The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between flow experience and goal orientation theory, as well as, the differences in flow experience based on the orthogonal model of goal orientation theory. Two hundred and seventy eight athletes completed the Task and Ego Orientation Sport Questionnaire based on how they usually feel. The Flow State Scale was completed thirty minutes after an important competition, along with the challenge-skill ratings, based on how athletes felt during the particular competition. (...) The results indicated that the athletes’ task orientation may be the critical factor for attaining flow in competitive sport, feeling more skillful and estimating the upcoming competition as challenging, while ego orientated athletes lack these elements, which are important for them to get into flow. Additionally, the balance between athletes’ goal orientation preferences seems important for the formation of flow experience. (shrink)

All around the world in March, due to COVID-19, competitive sport calendars were suddenly canceled, jeopardizing the training programs of athletes. Moreover, in Italy, the government banned all non-essential travel across the entire country from the beginning of March. Consequently, Italian cyclists were banned from leaving their homes and therefore unable to perform their ordinary training activities. The Italian Association of Professional Cyclists early on during that period noticed that several cyclists were experiencing a worrying decrease in their mental well-being (...) and asked the authors to set up an online Sport Psychology Intervention during lockdown to enhance the athletes' mental health. Through a number of unprecedented events and considerations, the aim of the current investigation was to assess the Italian cyclists' mental health during the lockdown and its changes after the SPI. We validated the Italian version of the Sport Mental Health Continuum Short Form —presented in Study 1—and then applied it to a sample of Italian professional cyclists—presented in Study 2—prior to and after the SPI. To achieve these objectives, the reliability and construct validity of the Italian version of the Sport MHC-SF were tested in Study 1. RM-MANOVA tests were run to evaluate the effect of SPI on cyclists in Study 2. A total of 185 Italian athletes were involved in the validation of the MHC in Study 1 and 38 professional cyclists in Study 2. Results from Study 1 suggested a three-factor higher order model of Sport MHC-SF [Model fit: χ2 = 471.252, p < 0.000; CFI = 0.951; RMSEA = 0.049; RMR= 0.048]. MCFA showed that the default model kept invariance among groups of athletes. Results from Study 2 highlighted that professional cyclists who followed the SPI were able to cope better with psychological stressors, showing improved well-being compared to the athletes that did not. No significant differences were found for emotional and social well-being. The present multi-study paper contributes to the theoretical field with a validated measure of Sport MHC-SF translated in the Italian language and culture. It also provides practical implications related to cases of reduced mental health due to injury, illness, or similar situations of home confinement in the future. (shrink)

Prior literature has demonstrated that religiosity is associated with a reduced acceptance of unethical business practices and financial reporting irregularities. On this premise, we examine whether religiosity, conceptualized as the degree of adherence to religious norms in the geographical area where a firm’s headquarters is located, has an impact on audit firms’ pricing decisions in the US. We measure the intensity of religiosity by the number of adherents relative to the total population in a county and demonstrate that increased religious (...) adherence operates as an institutionalized monitoring mechanism that decreases audit risk and audit costs, which is, in turn, reflected in reduced audit pricing. Additional tests suggest that the impact of religiosity on auditors’ pricing decisions is not differentiated by levels of auditor expertise but that audit fees are determined by an auditor’s relative location in a market sector and religious adherence. We conclude that religious adherence reduces the need for shareholders to bear the costs of monitoring agents, a finding which could be of importance for market participants and regulators. (shrink)

The book explores the forbidden feelings of beauty, admiration, or satisfaction before instances of terror and human pain from eighteenth-century natural disasters to twenty-first-century terrorist destruction. It explores the fascination felt by the subject witnessing major disasters directly or in a mediated fashion. Emmanouil Aretoulakis' makes the challenging proposition that there is, paradoxically, an ethics in the aesthetic appraisal of terror.

In an age of disseminated fear and globalized anxiety about the accelerated rhythms of modern life, should literary studies and criticism strive for the altogether “new”? I am interested in whether the intensive search for the “new” or “next” in contemporary culture is of any importance for literary studies. I argue that too much intellectual risk is involved in persistently calling for the new in the appraisal of a literary, or other, text. The scientific and “civilized” quest for a new (...) theory to replace theories that are supposedly outdated may end up degenerating into a positivistic, market-oriented venture into the world of excessive global consumption. The original or new in literature will probably derive from a less “civilized” and rather unconscious effort—a sudden flash of imagination or creativity, for instance. Such an “uncivil” stance regarding interpretation can be fruitfully linked with a form of literary ecology. (shrink)

Decision making in noisy and changing environments requires a fine balance between exploiting knowledge about good courses of action and exploring the environment in order to improve upon this knowledge. We present an experiment on a restless bandit task in which participants made repeated choices between options for which the average rewards changed over time. Comparing a number of computational models of participants’ behavior in this task, we find evidence that a substantial number of them balanced exploration and exploitation by (...) considering the probability that an option offers the maximum reward out of all the available options. (shrink)

Background: We like to think about sexual activity as something fixed, basic and primal. However, this does not seem to fully capture reality. Even when we relish sex, we may be capable of mentalizing, talking, voluntarily postponing orgasm, and much more. This might indicate that the central control mechanisms of sexual activity are quite flexible and susceptible to learning mechanisms, and that cortical brain areas play a critical part. Objective: This study aimed to identify those cortical areas and mechanisms most (...) consistently implicated in sexual activity. Design: A comprehensive review of the human functional neuroimaging literature on sexual activity, i.e. genital stimulation and orgasm, is made. Results: Genital stimulation recruits the classical somatosensory matrix, but also areas far beyond that. The posterior insula may be particularly important for processing input from the engorged penis and coordinating penile responses. Extrastriate visual cortex tracks sexual arousal and responds to genital stimulation even when subjects have their eyes closed. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is also tightly coupled to sexual arousal, but low activity in this area predicts high sexual arousal. Conclusion: This review has indicated cortical sites where activity is moderated by tactile genital inflow and high sexual arousal. Behavioral implications are discussed and where possible the relevance for learning mechanisms is indicated. Overall, it is clear that the cerebral cortex has something to say about sexual activity. Keywords: functional neuroimaging; insula; ventromedial prefrontal cortex; extrastriate visual cortex; penis; clitoris; orgasm (Published: 15 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 17337 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17337. (shrink)

Ensemble perception—the encoding of objects by their group properties—is known to be resistant to outlier noise. However, this resistance is somewhat paradoxical: how can the visual system determine which stimuli are outliers without already having derived statistical properties of the ensemble? A simple solution would be that ensemble perception is not a simple, one-step process; instead, outliers are detected through iterative computations that identify items with high deviance from the mean and reduce their weight in the representation over time. Here (...) we tested this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we found evidence that outliers are discounted from mean orientation judgments, extending previous results from ensemble face perception. In Experiment 2, we tested the timing of outlier rejection by having participants perform speeded judgments of sets with or without outliers. We observed significant increases in reaction time (RT) when outliers were present, but a decrease compared to no-outlier sets of matched range suggesting that range alone did not drive RTs. In Experiment 3 we tested the timing by which outlier noise reduces over time. We presented sets for variable exposure durations and found that noise decreases linearly over time. Altogether these results suggest that ensemble representations are optimized through iterative computations aimed at reducing noise. The finding that ensemble perception is an iterative process provides a useful framework for understanding contextual effects on ensemble perception. (shrink)

BackgroundFrontal brain dysfunction is a major challenge in neurorehabilitation. Neurofeedback (NF), as an EEG-based brain training method, is currently applied in a wide spectrum of mental health conditions, including traumatic brain injury.ObjectiveThis study aimed to explore the capacity of Infra-Low Frequency Neurofeedback (ILF-NF) to promote the recovery of brain function in patients with frontal brain injury.Materials and methodsTwenty patients hospitalized at a neurorehabilitation clinic in Switzerland with recently acquired, frontal and optionally other brain lesions were randomized to either receive NF (...) or sham-NF. Cognitive improvement was assessed using the Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB) and the Test of Attentional Performance (TAP) tasks regarding intrinsic alertness, phasic alertness and impulse control.ResultsWith respect to cognitive improvements, there was no significant difference between the two groups after 20 sessions of either NF or sham-NF. However, in a subgroup of patients with predominantly frontal brain lesions, the improvements measured by the FAB and intrinsic alertness were significantly higher in the NF-group.ConclusionThis is the first double-blind controlled study using NF in recovery from brain injury, and thus also the first such study of ILF NF. Although the result of the subgroup has limited significance because of the small number of participants, it accentuates the trend seen in the whole group regarding the FAB and intrinsic alertness (p = 0.068, p = 0.079, respectively). We therefore conclude that NF could be a promising candidate promoting the recoveryfrom frontal brain lesions. Further studies with larger numbers of patients and less lesion heterogeneity are needed to verify the usefulness of NF in the neurorehabilitation of patients with frontal brain injury (NCT02957695 ClinicalTrials.gov). (shrink)

Medical futility, one of the most debated end-of-life issues in medical ethics, has been discussed among physicians and scholars for years but remained an unresolved question. Roger C. Bone (1941–1997), an outstanding pulmonologist and critical care specialist, devoted his last years to ethical issues of terminal care, while facing himself metastatic renal cancer. Criticising the abuse of technology in terminal care and the administrative and financial interference on medical decisions, he bequeathed important points on futility, bringing also patients’ views into (...) attention. He stressed the importance of physician-patient relationship and prompted physicians to remain honest with their patients and stand with them till their very last moments. Roger Bone’s insight of futility, terminal care and physician-patient relationship remains an important legacy for health care professionals and for families and patients facing end-of-life issues. (shrink)