The Rating of Perceived Exertion Predicts Performance Loss and Physiological Demand in Vertical Jump Session Until Voluntary Failure

The aims of this study were (a) to assess the ability of the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) to predict performance loss (i.e. percent of drop in height relative to maximal height) of vertical jump session until voluntary failure, and (b) to determine the ability of RPE to describe the physiological demand of this session via heart rate monitor. Ten healthy men performed vertical jumps (counter-movement jump) until voluntary failure. Before session start maximal jump height for every subject was determined. Heart rate and RPE, separately for legs (RPE legs) and for breath (RPE breath), were recorded every ten jumps throughout the sessions. Results have shoved that RPE legs and performance loss have about 99% of same variance ( =0,9899; p<0,000), and RPE breath explains about 98% heart rate variance ( =0,9789; p<0,000) in vertical jump session until voluntary failure.

The Emotional Attentional Blink as a Measure of Patriotism

This study aims to explore whether the implicit processing of emotional symbols related to patriotic feeling may exert some effects on attention. Here, we have conducted an experiment using two interrelated tasks. First, we use flags with different meanings to participants for measuring the strength of the emotional attentional blink (EAB) within a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. Then, we use a “congruency judgments” subjective test, where we confront participants to judge the affinity between pairs of politician leaders and flags of different sign for community participants, while recording two physiological measures (Heart Rate Variance and Galvanic Skin Response) to evaluate the variations elicited by that confrontation. Results on the EAB task show a significant emotion induced blindness for emotional stimuli representing Catalan and Spanish patriotism (α = .05), while the effect does not appear for the stimulus representing neutral patriotism. The interaction “Flags x Patriotism” was significant, F(1, 51) = 4.62; p = .036; ηp2 = .083. Results on the second task show that measures derived from electrophysiological records are sensitive to patriotic feeling, both being complementary. In addition, by using measures of congruence, the “Leaders x Flags” interaction was significant, F(3.682, 125.204) = 53.55; p < .001; ηp2 = .612. Finally, a multiple linear regression model for each emotional inductor was verified for the Catalan case, using the EAB effect as criteria, R2Adjusted = .79; p < .001. Some theoretical and methodological aspects derived of this exploratory study are discussed.