‘Ref! Could You Help Me?’—Building a Positive Climate by Referees during Floorball Competitions in Youth Sport

In creating a positive climate in sport for children and youth, the role of adults is of key importance as their behavior and attitudes determine the experiences and multilateral development of young players. Relatively recently, the importance of the referee in creating a supportive sporting environment has begun to be emphasized. This concerns, in particular, team sports in which the referees interact with players many times and influence the course of the game. The aim of the study was to evaluate the quality of the referee–players’ interactions during youth floorball matches in terms of building a positive climate and responsiveness to the players’ needs. Another aim of the study was to examine whether the referee’s qualifications and players’ gender affect the quality of their interactions with the players. The study was conducted among 21 referees officiating matches for girls and boys aged 12–18. Naturalistic and structured observation methods were used in the study. The observation was conducted using a wireless intercom that allows listening to verbal messages directed to the players. Furthermore, the referee’s work was recorded using a camera. The results of the statistical tests did not show any significant differences in the assessment of referees between the groups distinguished in terms of the referees’ license and players’ gender in both examined dimensions. The observations showed that the average rating of building a positive climate by referees during a sporting event measured on a seven-point scale was ‘poor’ (2.81 pts). The referees were assessed significantly higher on the second dimension (responsiveness to the players’ needs), although an overall rating of 3.81 pts means a medium level of interaction quality. The results indicate areas in which referees can improve. They lead to the following conclusions: (i) the contents of training for floorball referees should include problems of pedagogy and developmental psychology; (ii) referees should be equipped with appropriate competencies for building a positive climate during matches and monitoring the players’ needs; (iii) referees appointed to officiate children and youth games should be characterized by appropriate predispositions.

Developmental psychology and age psychology

The textbook contains systematized information about psychological, socio-cultural, historical-ethnographic, psychobiological and other aspects of the development of a person changing over time. The first section is devoted to general theoretical problems of developmental psychology, the second to the analysis of different ages. The comprehensive nature of the manual makes it possible to solve the problems of formation in the professional consciousness of a stable complex of scientific categories and concepts, with the help of which the factual diversity of manifestations of the mental life of a developing person is described in psychology; familiarization with classical and modern interpretations of human development, with different variants of psychological interpretation of its essence, nature, mechanisms, driving forces and contradictions; disclosure of dialectics and phenomenology of the formation of a person as a cultural and historical subject; formation of ideas about the complexity and ambiguity of the evolution of a child as a human being; understanding the basic laws of the formation of personality and individuality of a person at each stage of its development. Meets the requirements of the federal state educational standards of higher education of the latest generation. It is intended for the study of the discipline "Developmental psychology, age psychology" during the professional training of psychologists in universities and is aimed at students of bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology faculties of classical and pedagogical universities, humanities and medical universities, as well as graduate students, psychology teachers and practical psychologists who are improving their qualifications in the field of age psychology.

“I Have No Capacities That Can Help Me”: Young Asylum Seekers in Norway and Serbia – Flight as Disturbance of Developmental Processes

Most studies on refugee populations are organized around trauma-related issues and focus on explaining pathological factors. Few studies are anchored in general developmental psychology with the aim of exploring normal age-specific developmental tasks and how the special circumstances associated with forced migration can influence how developmental tasks are negotiated. This study is part of a larger mixed method study seeking to identify resilience-promoting and resilience-inhibiting factors, on individual and contextual levels, among asylum seekers and refugees on the move (passing through Serbia) and settled in reception centers in Norway. A strategic sample of 20 adolescent and young adult refugees/asylum seekers during flight in Serbia (10) and after arrival in Norway (10) was chosen from a sample of 178 refugees interviewed in depth in Serbia and at receptions centers in Norway. The sample reflects the focus of this paper, which is to explore adolescent and young adult refugees/asylum seekers’ psychological and social needs and resources during flight to and after arrival in the host country, including how developmental tasks are negotiated. Through qualitative analysis, experiences associated with the developmental changes the participants experienced before, during, and after flight are contextualized. Their sense of self, their relationships with their families and their perceptions of their situation as adolescents or young adults in a highly unpredictable situation are presented in the light of relevant theory and findings from similar refugee studies. All the participants have fled from dangerous and intolerable situations in their home countries. They describe extreme dangers during flight in contexts that are unpredictable and where they feel lonely and unsupported. Most have unmet psychosocial needs and have received little support or help for their mental health issues during flight or after arrival in Norway. Suggestions for interventions and resilience-promoting actions are given based on the findings of the study.

Bringing Home Baby Euclid: Testing Infants’ Basic Shape Discrimination Online

Online developmental psychology studies are still in their infancy, but their role is newly urgent in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the suspension of in-person research. Are online studies with infants a suitable stand-in for laboratory-based studies? Across two unmonitored online experiments using a change-detection looking-time paradigm with 96 7-month-old infants, we found that infants did not exhibit measurable sensitivities to the basic shape information that distinguishes between 2D geometric forms, as had been observed in previous laboratory experiments. Moreover, while infants were distracted in our online experiments, such distraction was nevertheless not a reliable predictor of their ability to discriminate shape information. Our findings suggest that the change-detection paradigm may not elicit infants’ shape discrimination abilities when stimuli are presented on small, personal computer screens because infants may not perceive two discrete events with only one event displaying uniquely changing information that draws their attention. Some developmental paradigms used with infants, even those that seem well-suited to the constraints and goals of online data collection, may thus not yield results consistent with the laboratory results that rely on highly controlled settings and specialized equipment, such as large screens. As developmental researchers continue to adapt laboratory-based methods to online contexts, testing those methods online is a necessary first step in creating robust tools and expanding the space of inquiry for developmental science conducted online.

Creation and validation of the Picture-Set of Young Children’s Affective Facial Expressions (PSYCAFE)

The immediate detection and correct processing of affective facial expressions are one of the most important competences in social interaction and thus a main subject in emotion and affect research. Generally, studies in these research domains, use pictures of adults who display affective facial expressions as experimental stimuli. However, for studies investigating developmental psychology and attachment behaviour it is necessary to use age-matched stimuli, where it is children that display affective expressions. PSYCAFE represents a newly developed picture-set of children’s faces. It includes reference portraits of girls and boys aged 4 to 6 years averaged digitally from different individual pictures, that were categorized to six basic affects (fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, anger and surprise) plus a neutral facial expression by cluster analysis. This procedure led to deindividualized and affect prototypical portraits. Individual affect expressive portraits of adults from an already validated picture-set (KDEF) were used in a similar way to create affect prototypical images also of adults. The stimulus set has been validated on human observers and entail emotion recognition accuracy rates and scores for intensity, authenticity and likeability ratings of the specific affect displayed. Moreover, the stimuli have also been characterized by the iMotions Facial Expression Analysis Module, providing additional data on probability values representing the likelihood that the stimuli depict the expected affect. Finally, the validation data from human observers and iMotions are compared to data on facial mimicry of healthy adults in response to these portraits, measured by facial EMG (m. zygomaticus major and m. corrugator supercilii).

Aspects of Data Quality in Psychology: Missing Data and Aberrant Responses

Data preprocessing is an integral step prior to analyzing data in the social sciences. The purpose of this article is to report the current practices psychological researchers use to address data preprocessing or quality concerns with a focus on issues pertaining to aberrant responses and missing data in self report measures. 240 articles were sampled from four journals: Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Abnormal Psychology from 2012 to 2018. We found that nearly half of the studies did not report any missing data treatment (111/240; 46.25%) and if they did, the most common approach to handle missing data was listwise deletion (71/240; 29.6%). Studies that remove data due to missingness removed, on average, 12% of the sample. We also found that most studies do not report any methodology to address aberrant responses (194/240; 80.83%). For studies that reported issues with aberrant responses, a study would classify 4% of the sample, on average, as suspect responses. These results suggest that most studies are either not transparent enough about their data preprocessing steps or maybe leveraging suboptimal procedures. We outline recommendations for researchers to improve the transparency and/or the data quality of their study.