A New Circle of Hell: The Postwar Gulag and the Rise of the Special Camps

This chapter takes the Gulag into the postwar era when authorities used the institution in an attempt to reassert social control. At the same time, arrivals from the newly annexed western territories and former Red Army soldiers dramatically altered the social world of the Gulag prisoner. New prisoner populations of war veterans, nationalist guerrillas, and peoples with significant life experience outside the Soviet Union provided a potentially combustible mix. The isolation and concentration of many of these prisoners in a small number of special camps raised even further the potential explosiveness of the population. The Gulag was a political institution, though, and it was only the death of the system's founder that would set off the explosions.

The Sport Experience of Athletes with Intellectual Disabilities: A National Survey of Special Olympics Athletes and Their Families

The purpose of this study was to examine the sport experience for athletes with intellectual disabilities (ID) who participate in Special Olympics (SO). This study included a nationally representative sample of 1,307 families and 579 athletes in the U.S., focusing on sport involvement over the lifespan and motives for participating and for leaving SO. Athletes with ID are similar to athletes without disabilities in that sport is a significant life experience. They participate in sport for fun (54%) and social interaction (21%). Like athletes without disabilities, SO athletes leave sport because of changes in interest (38%) but also because of program availability (33%). These findings suggest that we continue to document the involvement of people with ID in sports and work to expand the sport opportunities available.

A Qualitative Investigation of a Personal-Disclosure Mutual-Sharing Team Building Activity

This study examined 27 male intercollegiate ice hockey players’ subjective responses to a personal-disclosure mutual-sharing team building activity (cf. Crace & Hardy, 1997; Yukelson, 1997) delivered at a national championship tournament. Athletes participated in semistructured interviews 2 to 4 weeks after the team building meetings. Results revealed that the meetings were emotionally intense, and some participants described their involvement in these meetings as a significant life experience. Participants perceived certain benefits associated with the meetings including enhanced understanding (of self and others), increased cohesion (closeness and playing for each other), and improved confidence (confidence in teammates and feelings of invincibility). Results are discussed in terms of their potential to guide future applied evaluation research of team building programs in sport.

Empirical Evidence for Assumptions Underlying Time Orientation in Undergraduates

282 undergraduate students between 17 and 68 years of age were asked to list the 5 most significant experiences of their lives, to assign time zones to these experiences, and to provide estimates of emotional valence corresponding to each significant life experience they listed. Subjects also provided judgements of time perspective on a Life Line. The sample showed a near-past orientation and a positive emotional valence across the experiences reported. However, the first experiences reported were distant past experiences significantly more frequently than expected by chance, while the last experiences in the Experiential Inventory were significantly more often located in the distant future. While this result validates the prevailing assumption of a unidirectional flow of past to future, empirical evidence was also found for the larger magnitude and variability of future as compared with past perspective. This suggests a bidirectional model of time should be invoked to explain the differing character of the opponent temporal processes of recall and anticipation in human experience.