Effects of a Brief Mindfulness Based Group Intervention On College Students

Increases in the number of college students seeking mental health services require counseling centers to explore innovative strategies to provide effective and efficient treatments. Group interventions offer an alternative to traditional individual counseling, allowing centers to serve more students with fewer clinical staff (Burlingame et al., 2016). Of current group modalities, mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been growing in popularity as an effective approach for addressing college students’ increasingly complex needs. This study describes the evaluation of a three-session mindfulness-based intervention on students’ mindfulness, symptoms, and stress. Compared to a comparison group of 109 students not seeking counseling center services, 78 students who received the intervention reported increased mindfulness, and decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress at the end of the group. Furthermore, improvements in mindfulness mediated intervention effects on symptoms of depression and anxiety. These gains were generally maintained 3 weeks later. These findings support the benefits of brief group interventions for college students. Suggestions for modifications to the intervention and for future research are discussed.     

Formula-based research incentive plans at colleges and universities

Financial problems at colleges and universities have led many institutions to initiate extra efforts to obtain extramural funds. One such effort has been the establishment of formula-based research incentive plans. These plans generally utilize the recovery of indirect costs as the basis for allocating additional incentive funds to various areas as an encouragement to obtain additional extramural funds. Data from surveys conducted by the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Ohio University were combined with National Science Foundation reports to provide information about this relatively recent phenomena. The increasing popularity of these plans was shown in that a majority of institutions had such plans in effect during FY 1979. Analyses of the effectiveness of these plans showed no statistically significant differences between institutions with incentive plans and those without such plans, although mean federal research expenditures were approximately 20% greater at those institutions without these incentive plans. The evidence presented indicates that the receipt of federal research funds is not associated with the use of a formula-based research incentive plan.     

Positive emotions: passionate scholarship and student transformation

This paper challenges the practical and conceptual understanding of the role of emotions in higher education from the twin perspectives of transition and transformation. Focusing on the neglected area of positive emotions, exploratory data reveal a rich, low-level milieu of undergraduate emotional awareness in students chiefly attributed to pedagogic actions, primarily extrinsically orientated, and pervasive throughout the learning experience. The data conceive positive affect as oppositional, principally ephemeral and linked to performative pedagogic endeavours of getting, knowing and doing. A cyclical social dynamic of reciprocity, generating positive feedback loops, is highlighted. Finally we inductively construct a tentative ‘emotion-transition framework’ to assist our understanding of positive emotion as a force for transformational change; our contention is that higher education might proactively craft pedagogic spaces so as to unite the feeling discourse, the thinking discourse (epistemological self) and the wider life-self (ontological) discourse.     

Language and reading impairments are associated with increased prevalence of non-right-handedness

Handedness has been studied for association with language-related disorders because of its link with language hemispheric dominance. No clear pattern has emerged, possibly because of small samples, publication bias, and heterogeneous criteria across studies. Non-right-handedness (NRH) frequency was assessed in N = 2503 cases with reading and/or language impairment and N = 4316 sex-matched controls identified from 10 distinct cohorts (age range 6–19 years old; European ethnicity) using a priori set criteria. A meta-analysis (N_cases = 1994) showed elevated NRH % in individuals with language/reading impairment compared with controls (OR = 1.21, CI = 1.06–1.39, p = .01). The association between reading/language impairments and NRH could result from shared pathways underlying brain lateralization, handedness, and cognitive functions.     

Correlation between maximum in-shoe plantar pressures and clubhead speed in amateur golfers

Disagreements exist in the literature regarding the manner in which weight should be dynamically shared during the golf swing, both within-feet and between the back- and target-foot, to generate maximal clubhead speed. The purpose of this study was to determine whether preferential foot-loading locations underlie weight sharing by examining the correlation between clubhead speed and maximum plantar pressure (PP) distributions. Thirty-two amateur golfers with handicap indexes ranging from 2.7 to 25 performed 10 driver swings on artificial turf following a warm-up. PP distributions were recorded at 100 Hz, and clubhead speed was recorded using a ball-tracking Doppler radar system. Maximum PPs were extracted from a 2-s window approximately centred on ball contact and were regressed against clubhead speed. Significance was assessed over the entire foot surface using statistical parametric mapping (SPM), a spatially continuous technique. SPM revealed, at relatively high anatomical resolution, significant positive correlations between clubhead speed and PPs in the lateral target-foot (P < 0.05). This suggests that not only weight transfer but also weight-transfer location may be an important determinant of clubhead speed in amateur golfers.