Girls and Young Women in Community Sport: A South Australian Perspective

Girls' and young women's engagement and disengagement in physical activity has been well documented in Western culture. Sport plays a pivotal role in the development of behaviours that promote physical activity, particularly through commitment to team and individual goal attainment, socialisation, and feelings of belonging and self-identity. Community sport in Australia is the dominant pathway into state, national, and elite international competition. The importance of community sport in the lives of girls and young women cannot be overstated, irrespective of individual long-term sporting goals. Indeed, the dropout rate of girls in sports, like many other western cultures is significant and is certainly disproportionate to the numbers of boys who drop out. The present study aims to examine the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and environmental influences on community sporting pathways for girls and young women. Using a mixed-methods design, we include survey data from 2,189 high-school students (aged 12–18 years) and focus group and individual interview data from a subset of 37 high-school students, parents, and teachers, across metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia. The study included an examination of sporting practises and insights of male sport participants from the same age groups to juxtapose the findings and provide a more comprehensive understanding of girls' and young women's community sporting involvement. Parents and teachers were also included within the participant cohort to provide a comprehensive perspective. The results highlight the challenges that girls face with respect to engagement and disengagement in sport and particular points throughout their adolescent years. Recommendations are provided to help mitigate potential attrition of girls in sport in the future.

Neural responses associated with attentional engagement and disengagement from threat in high socially anxious children: Evidence from temporal-spatial PCA

Background Cognitive models indicated that social anxiety disorder (SAD) would be caused and maintained by a biased attentional processing of threatening information. This study investigates whether socially anxious children may present impaired attentional engagement and disengagement from negative emotional faces, as well as their underlying event-related potential responses. Methods and findings Fifteen children with high levels of social anxiety (HSA; 9 boys; mean age = 9.99y; SD = 1.14) and twenty low socially anxious children (LSA; 16 boys; mean age = 10.47y; SD = 1.17) participated in a spatial cueing task in which they had to detect targets following neutral/disgusted faces in a valid or invalid location. No group effect was reported on reaction times [p>.05]. However, electrophysiological data showed lower P3a amplitude in HSA children compared with the LSA group when processing facial stimuli. They also reported larger N2 amplitudes for valid-disgusted targets and a larger P3a amplitude for the invalid-disgusted ones. Conclusion In terms of electrophysiological data, our results validated, the hypothesis of attentional disengagement difficulties in SAD children. We also confirm the idea that high levels of social anxiety are associated with cognitive control impairments and have a greater impact on the processing efficiency than on the performance effectiveness.

Higher education blended learning: a network study of student learning paths

For the aim of this research, a model of students' learning pathways as a network that records time and sequence of learning events is introduced. These learning pathways networks also establish the online learning rate. Results demonstrate that pupils who passed learned more online than those who failed. The findings of the person-centered study demonstrate that only test anxiety affects the number of nodes and arcs of the individual learning pathway network, which was represented as an individual network. Also, the qualities of social networks are influenced by how active or inactive users are. There is evidence to back up the theory that pupils who are driven to learn do not necessarily study more information. As a result of exam anxiety, engagement, and disengagement, the learning pathways of individuals are shaped and reshaped throughout time.

Help-Seeking as a Maladaptive Coping Style in the Pandemic Scenario: What Worked and What Did Not for Facing This New Stressor

The spread of COVID-19 and its related confinement measures were important stressors for a large part of the global population, with massive effects on both physical and mental health. Assessing how individuals coped with such a stressor and which strategies were effective is one of the main challenges for psychological research. In this study, we aimed to investigate the coping strategies implied during the COVID-19 lockdown and their effectiveness. We recruited 374 Italian participants through convenience sampling during the first pandemic wave (April 2020). We administered to our participants an online battery of questionnaires including the Brief COPE, the use of alternative coping strategies proposed by the WHO to help people facing lockdown stress, and a range of psychological symptoms. An exploratory factor analysis conducted on the subscales of the Brief COPE revealed a three-factor structure. Following the previous literature, we named these factors engagement, disengagement, and help-seeking coping styles. In the pandemic scenario, the engagement and disengagement styles revealed the typical correlation patterns with psychological symptoms (i.e., the engagement was adaptive while the disengagement was maladaptive). Instead, contrary to previous literature, help-seeking was positively related to psychological symptoms, suggesting a mismatch between searching for help and finding it during the lockdown. This result supports the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of coping strategies in the pandemic scenario, to give more compelling and precise advice to the population.

Four Core Concepts in Psychiatric Diagnosis

In the present article, we aimed at describing the diagnostic process in Psychiatry through a phenomenological perspective. We have identified 4 core concepts which may represent the joints of a phenomenologically oriented diagnosis. The “tightrope walking” attitude refers to the psychiatrist’s ability to swing between 2 different and sometimes contrasting tendencies (e.g., engagement and disengagement). The “holistic experience” includes all those intuitive, nonverbal, and pre-thematic elements that emerge in the early stages of the clinical encounter as an emanation of the atmospheric quality of the intersubjective space. The “co-construction of symptoms” regards the hermeneutic process behind psychiatric symptoms, involving both the patient as a self-interpreting agent and the clinician as a translator of his/her experience. Finally, by the “evolving typification” we mean that the closer the relationship becomes with the patient, the more specific and nuanced becomes the typification behind psychiatric diagnosis. Each of these concepts will be accompanied by an extract from a clinical case deriving from one of the authors’ most recent clinical experiences.

Validation of the Polish Version of the Brief Measure of Perceived Divine Engagement and Disengagement in Response to Prayer (PDED)

Divine engagement applies to a positive relationship with God in which people feel that God is close to them and answers their prayers. Divine disengagement pertains to an unsteady connection and a sense of God’s absence. Although several questionnaires consider the concerns of the human experience of prayer, only one deals precisely with the subject of the human perception of divine engagement and disengagement in response to one’s prayer. The main goals of the present research were to: (1) determine the latent structure of the Brief Measure of Perceived Divine Engagement and Disengagement in Response to Prayer (PDED) in a sample set; (2) test whether the factor structure indicated by EFA matches the data and provides an equivalent goodness-of-fit index to Exline’s model; and (3) confirm that perceived divine engagement and disengagement are correlated with religious meaning, gratitude to God, and dimensions of religious centrality. The results show that the proposed two-factor structure of the eight-item version of the PDED is a suitable and reliable solution of the original PDED (Study 1). Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) revealed a good fit of the data to the model in both the second and third studies. Both dimensions of the PDED correlated significantly with all of the subscales of the RMS, GGQ–6, and CRS–15. The Polish version of the PDED demonstrated very good psychometric properties.

God’s Perceived Engagement/Disengagement in Response to Prayer and Interpersonal Forgiveness: The Mediating Role of Positive Orientation

It is well documented that religion and its different aspects positively affect people’s ability to forgive. However, studies have rarely moved beyond direct associations to explore potential mediators of this relationship. In this context, our main aim was to examine the direct relationship between God’s engagement/disengagement in response to prayer and forgiveness with the possible influence of a positive orientation. Data were gathered from 464 participants aged 18 to 75 (M = 31.10; SD = 11.32). This study included 255 women (55%) and 209 men. We used the Brief Measure of Perceived Divine Engagement and Disengagement in Response to Prayer, the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory, and the Positivity Scale. In line with our hypotheses, interpersonal forgiveness correlated positively with God’s perceived engagement (H1); it was negatively associated with God’s disengagement (H2); and it was positively linked to positive orientation (H3). Moreover, positive orientation mediated the relationship between religiosity and interpersonal forgiveness. This may suggest that positivity is not indifferent in the process of forgiving, especially when people are aware of God’s involvement in their lives.