Everything is cool when you're part of a team? The effects of outcome interdependence on appraisal, emotions, and performance under pressure.

Pressure is an innate feature of competition and stimulates cognitions and emotions that can both reduce and enhance performance. Similarly, teams are ubiquitous in sport and influence their members in various ways. Yet, we know little about the ways in which teams influence their members' responses to pressure, whether they are an added demand, inducing social indispensability and exacerbating the effects of pressure, or a resource, providing shared responsibility and buffering pressure effects. We conducted a field experiment across two samples of skilled handball players (N = 189) to test how outcome interdependence vs. independence influenced athletes' appraisals of task importance and coping prospects, anxiety and excitement, and penalty shooting performance under lower vs. higher situational pressure, and to what extent performance order and teammate skill moderated these effects. We found that pressure increased task importance and emotional intensity yet being part of a team or not made little difference. Descriptively, interdependence did attenuate the increase in anxiety under higher pressure and, if paired with skilled teammates, strengthen the increase in excitement. Yet, weak pressure manipulations, insensitive samples and measures require replication and prohibit conclusive interpretations regarding the influence of teams on members' responses to pressure.

"Switching the mind off completely" - Understanding the psychology of rest in coaches.

OBJECTIVES: To better understand the psychology of rest in coaches. Rest appears to be important for coping, recovery, and well-being in coaches, yet there is limited research on and in turn understanding of this concept in this population. DESIGN: A qualitative description study design was employed. METHOD: 22 NCAA Division I coaches were interviewed about what rest means to them, key barriers to rest in coaching, and strategies employed to obtain rest in the face of these barriers. A codebook thematic analysis was undertaken to examine the analytical generalizability (Smith, 2018) to the coaching context of an extant model of the psychology of rest in athletes (Eccles & Kazmier, 2019). RESULTS: The Eccles-Kazmier model appears to offer some analytical generalizability to the coaching context. Consistent with the model, the process of resting in coaches involves both sleep and resting while awake. Resting while awake involves (a) a break from thinking about work, (b) a break from effortful thinking generally, and (c) engaging in life outside coaching. However, departures from the model were also observed; specifically, unlike for athletes, the wakeful resting process for coaches does not appear to involve assuming control or experiencing variety. CONCLUSION: The findings advance the current understanding of the constituents of rest in coaches and can inform coach education about how to obtain the rest needed to perform effectively and stay healthy.

Coping in the Emergency Medical Services: Associations With the Personnel's Stress, Self-Efficacy, Job Satisfaction, and Health.

Background: Emergency Medical Services personnel (EMSP) are recurrently exposed to chronic and traumatic stressors in their occupation. Effective coping with occupational stressors plays a key role in enabling their health and overall well-being. In this study, we examined the habitual use of coping strategies in EMSP and analyzed associations of coping with the personnel's health and well-being. Method: A total of N = 106 German Red Cross EMSP participated in a cross-sectional survey involving standardized questionnaires to report habitual use of different coping strategies (using the Brief-COPE), their work-related stress, work-related self-efficacy, job satisfaction, as well as mental and physical stress symptoms. Results: A confirmatory factor analysis corroborated seven coping factors which have been identified in a previous study among Italian emergency workers. Correlation analyses indicated the coping factor "self-criticism" is associated with more work-related stress, lower job satisfaction, and higher depressive, posttraumatic, and physical stress symptoms. Although commonly viewed as adaptive coping, the coping factors "support/venting", "active coping/planning", "humor", "religion", and "positive reappraisal" were not related to health and well-being in EMSP. Exploratory correlation analyses suggested that only "acceptance" was linked to better well-being and self-efficacy in EMSP. Conclusion: Our results emphasize the need for in-depth investigation of adaptive coping in EMSP to advance occupation-specific prevention measures.

Psychological mediators of exercise adherence among older adults in a group-based randomized trial.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the psychological mediators of exercise adherence among older adults in a group-based physical activity randomized controlled trial. METHOD: Older adults (≥65 years) were randomized to one of three conditions as part of the "GrOup-based physical Activity for oLder adults" (GOAL) randomized controlled trial. These included similar age same gender (SASG) and similar age mixed gender (SAMG) exercise programs that were informed by the tenets of self-categorization theory, and a "standard" mixed age mixed gender (MAMG) exercise program. Participants represented a subgroup (n = 483, Mage = 71.41 years) from the larger trial (n = 627) who completed measures of the trial's putative psychological mediators (i.e., group cohesion and affective attitudes) over the course of the 24-week exercise programs. RESULTS: Piecewise latent growth modeling revealed different trajectories between participants in the two intervention conditions (SASG, SAMG) when compared with the comparison MAMG condition with regard to perceptions of group cohesion and affective attitudes. Results of subsequent cross-lagged panel modeling revealed that better program adherence in the two intervention conditions, when compared with the referent MAMG condition, was mediated by perceptions of group cohesion. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide insight into how the two intervention programs differentially strengthened perceptions of group cohesion and affective attitudes over time. Consistent with self-categorization theory, the results also shed light on the role of group cohesion, in particular, as a psychological mechanism of action to promote older adults' exercise adherence behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of Group-Based Exercise on Flourishing and Stigma Consciousness among Older Adults: Findings from a Randomised Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND: To examine the extent to which group-based exercise programs, informed by self-categorisation theory, result in improvements in psychological flourishing and reductions in age- and gender-related stigma consciousness among older adults. METHODS: In the study, older adults (N = 485, ≥ 65 years) were randomised to similar age same gender (SASG), similar age mixed gender (SAMG), or "standard" mixed age mixed gender (MAMG) group-based exercise programs. Flourishing and stigma consciousness were assessed on six occasions during the 24-week intervention and represented secondary trial outcomes. Multilevel growth models examined the effects of the interventions on flourishing and stigma consciousness over time. RESULTS: Participants in the SASG and SAMG conditions demonstrated, on average, higher levels of flourishing, relative to the MAMG condition, over the course of the 24 weeks (p < .05). Additionally, participants demonstrated lower levels of age- and gender-related stigma consciousness in both the SASG and SAMG conditions relative to the MAMG condition (p < .05). No time by group interaction effects were observed for either flourishing or stigma consciousness. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide some support for the utility of group exercise programs, informed by self-categorisation theory, to enhance psychological flourishing and reduce stigma consciousness among older adults.