Contextual influences and athlete attitudes to drugs in sport

This article reports on 11 narrative-based case histories which sought to: (1) uncover the attitudes of players and athletes to drugs in sport, and (2) explore contextual factors influencing the formation of those attitudes as informed by social ecology theory. Overall, participants viewed the use of banned performance-enhancing substances as cheating, ‘hard’ non-performance-enhancing recreational or illicit substances as unwise, legal non-performance-enhancing substances as acceptable, and legal performance-enhancing substances as essential. In short, attitudes were sometimes quite libertarian, and contingent upon first, the legality of the substance, and second, its performance impact. Results also indicated that athletes’ attitudes about drugs were fundamentally shaped by sport's culture. Other significant factors included its commercial scale, closely identifiable others, early experiences and critical incidents of players and athletes, and their level of performance.     

Enuresis: An historical,cultural, and contemporary account of etiology and treatment

The authors discuss the cultural relativism of enuresis and the subsequent notion that urinary incontinence may not be a disease or psychopathy, but, rather, a problem associated with social expectations and developmental delays. Published literature has revealed that, historically, enuretic children have been subjected to distressing and painful methods of treatment, i. e., medications, mechanical devices, and pharmacologic preparations, to the point of permanent disability. They also discuss the evolution of explanations and treatments for enuresis from the Middle Ages into the 1970s, with emphasis on the successful use of behaviral therapies and meaningful parent and child reeducation.     

Effects of auditory stress on grooming dominance in the rat

Two experiments examined the effects of high-intensity white noise on the subsequent monopolization of mutual grooming by dominant members of male rat pairs. Only in cases where dominants were subjected to acoustic stress in the absence of another rat did they manifest a reduction in subsequent grooming behavior. Stressed in the company of either their own submissive partners or randomly selected rats, dominants continued to monopolize mutual grooming activity. The data emphasized the relevance of the social context in which stress is administered for the consequent social reactivity of the laboratory rat.