A meta-cognitive approach to doping in sports: The effects of thought validation on attitudes related to doping

ABSTRACT

To better understand doping-related attitude change, it is important to consider not only the amount of thinking (i.e., elaboration) done by message recipients, but also the favourability of their thoughts in response to the proposal, as well as the perceived validity in their thoughts. The main goal of the present study was to analyse the effects of a meta-cognitive process (i.e., thought validation) on attitudes related to doping. Thus, we randomly assigned participants to read a message either against or in favour of legalising several doping behaviours. Participants listed their thoughts regarding the proposal and indicated the perceived validity in their thoughts, then reported their attitudes. As hypothesised, the message against legalisation elicited more unfavourable thoughts and attitudes than the message in favour of legalisation. Most relevantly, the effects of the message direction on attitudes were greater for participants with higher (vs. lower) levels of thought validity. Furthermore, consistent with the thought validation process, results revealed that thought favourability was a better predictor of attitudes for participants with higher (vs. lower) perceived thought validity, indicating that perceiving one’s thoughts as valid plays an important role in persuasion. These findings provide novel insights for research and interventions regarding doping in sports.     

Graduate Studies in the UK: Some Impressions and Suggestions

Many western countries are paying increasing attention to the organization and administration of graduate studies. Such attention has developed from primary concerns about completion times, completion percentages, programme quality, and student quality, as well as secondary concerns about supervisors, funding, coursework, inter-organizational co-operation, and policies and practices of both universities and research councils. Using information about British graduate programmes as a basis, the article presents policy issues related to research councils, funding councils, and control, followed by discussion of the themes of the nature of programmes, supervision and evaluation, completion time, quality, and innovation. The final sections address several concerns and offer some suggestions.     

Measuring Search Engine Quality

The effectiveness of twenty public search engines is evaluated using TREC-inspired methods and a set of 54 queries taken from real Web search logs. The World Wide Web is taken as the test collection and a combination of crawler and text retrieval system is evaluated. The engines are compared on a range of measures derivable from binary relevance judgments of the first seven live results returned. Statistical testing reveals a significant difference between engines and high intercorrelations between measures. Surprisingly, given the dynamic nature of the Web and the time elapsed, there is also a high correlation between results of this study and a previous study by Gordon and Pathak. For nearly all engines, there is a gradual decline in precision at increasing cutoff after some initial fluctuation. Performance of the engines as a group is found to be inferior to the group of participants in the TREC-8 Large Web task, although the best engines approach the median of those systems. Shortcomings of current Web search evaluation methodology are identified and recommendations are made for future improvements. In particular, the present study and its predecessors deal with queries which are assumed to derive from a need to find a selection of documents relevant to a topic. By contrast, real Web search reflects a range of other information need types which require different judging and different measures.     

数字图书馆数据库开发和使用中的版权问题

数据库的开发和利用是数字图书馆建设与读者服务的重要内容和基础。本文在总结数据库版权保护现状的基础上 ,对数字图书馆数据库的开发、数据库的保护期以及合理使用等问题作了重点阐述     

第9届世界杯女子排球赛中国队快攻战术运用效果

通过对 2 0 0 3年世界杯女子排球赛的各参赛队的技术统计分析 ,了解中国女排快攻战术运用现状。结果显示 :中国女排快攻战术效果高于强攻 ,得分率也高于巴西、美国队。提示 :坚持快、变战术是中国女子排球队取胜的重要武器     

WINDOWS终端在图书馆中的应用

主要阐述了Windows终端与传统PC的区别,以及Windows终端的特点、优势及其在图书馆中的应用。