Stress Reduction and Mood Enhancement in Four Exercise Modes: Swimming,Body Conditioning,Hatha Yoga,and Fencing

Abstract

The influence of exercise mode and practice qualities on the stress reduction benefits of exercise was examined. College students in swimming, body conditioning, hatha yoga, fencing, exercise, and lecture-control classes completed the Profile of Mood States and the State Anxiety Inventory before and after class on three occasions. Swimmers had unusually positive initial moods and reported less tension and confusion after swimming only on the first day of testing. Participants in yoga, an anaerobic activity that satisfied three of the four mode requirements, were significantly less anxious, tense, depressed, angry, fatigued, and confused after class than before on all three occasions. Supporting the importance of the four mode characteristics, participants in the exercise control activity of fencing reported improvements only in vigor. A possible influence of practice conditions was observed when members of the body conditioning class reported significant increases in fatigue, but no other mood changes. Results of this study supported the possibility that exercise mode and practice requirements in the proposed taxonomy moderate the stress reduction benefits.     

Effect of a Pedometer-Based Intervention on Daily Step Counts of Community-Dwelling Older Adults

This study investigated the effect of a 12-week pedometer-based intervention on daily step counts of 147 older adults randomly assigned to an intervention or wait-list control group (M age = 72.9 years, SD = 8.8). The intervention group significantly increased their daily step counts after 12 weeks (M = 639, SD = 2,239) and continued to significantly increase during a 12-week maintenance period (M = 680, SD = 1,721). The control group exhibited no change during the control period (M =-393, SD = 2,050) but had a significant increase in daily step counts (M = 1,580, SD = 2,305) when enrolled in the intervention. The pedometer-based intervention was effective in increasing participants' daily step counts.     

Research Abstracts

Abstract

Retention and relearning of five novel gross motor skills after a long period of no practice were studied. College women were classified into high, average, and low skill groups in a previous experiment, and this classification of 36 of the original subjects was retained in the present retesting study. A high degree of skill was retained after approximately one year of no practice. Relearning to previously attained skill levels was rapid. There were significant differences among classified high, average, and low skill groups in learning, retention, and relearning.     

Large-scale randomized controlled trial with 4th graders using intelligent tutoring of the structure strategy to improve nonfiction reading comprehension

Reading comprehension is a challenge for K-12 learners and adults. Nonfiction texts, such as expository texts that inform and explain, are particularly challenging and vital for students?? understanding because of their frequent use in formal schooling (e.g., textbooks) as well as everyday life (e.g., newspapers, magazines, and medical information). The structure strategy is explicit instruction about how to strategically use knowledge about text structures for encoding and retrieval of information from nonfiction and has consistently shown significant improvements in reading comprehension. We present the delivery of the structure strategy using a web-based intelligent tutoring system (ITSS) that has the potential to offer consistent modeling, practice tasks, assessment, and feedback to the learner. Finally, we report on statistically significant findings from a large scale randomized controlled efficacy trial with rural and suburban 4th-grade students using ITSS.     

Locus of control, persistence, and use of contingency information in physically abused children

Abused children are believed to develop in a harsh environment with minimal contingency of parental responses to their behavior. Seligman proposed that noncontingent caregiving produces helplessness. In this study, helplessness was assessed by measures of persistence and locus of control and by an experimental manipulation which varied contingency feedback. Compared to matched nonabused peers, abused children showed no less persistence in working for rewards, made equivalent use of contingency information to maintain persistence, and assumed equivalent responsibility for success. However, they took less responsibility for failure. Family learning history may render abused children helpless primarily in avoidance of aversive outcomes.     

ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tools Retrospective version (ICAST-R): Delphi study and field testing in seven countries

ObjectivesTo gain consensus among an ethnically and linguistically diverse group of international child protection experts on the structure and content of a new survey tool for retrospective measurement of child abuse, and to determine the performance of the instrument through an international field trial with young adults.MethodsThe questionnaire was developed through focus group discussions with international experts, and then subjected to a Delphi study in two waves to determine the perceived importance and translatability of items. The resultant questionnaire was translated into six languages and field tested in seven countries with convenient samples of young adults aged 18–26 years (N = 842).ResultsChild maltreatment experts from 28 countries provided input to questionnaire development. Satisfactory agreement on draft item inclusion and exclusion and the translatability of items was gained. The tool includes 15 primary questions about potentially abusive physical, sexual and emotional events, with follow-up questions about perpetrator characteristics, frequency of acts and periods in childhood when the recalled abuse occurred. The field test revealed lifetime prevalence per item usually exceeded 10% (11/15 items; range 2.1–49.5%). Internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) was moderate to high for each of three item sub-sets (between .61 and .82) and the rates of missing data were low (less than 1.5% for 14 of 15 items). The great majority of respondents nominated either peer and/or adult perpetrators (between 82.3% and 98.2% depending upon the item), and among these, child/adolescent peers and non-family adults (including teachers for emotional and physical acts) were nominated often.ConclusionsThe ICAST-R is based on consensus from international experts, translates clearly and has satisfactory properties for adoption as a survey tool to estimate prevalence and describe perpetrators and other contextual aspects of child abuse.Practice implicationsThis tool can be utilized in a broad range of cultures and languages and may contribute to improved research practice. Although the core items are limited to just 15 acts of maltreatment, if these behaviorally specific questions are adopted as key indicators and incorporated into comprehensive local, national or regional surveys, eventually there should be greater comparability in survey estimates.