28. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

In high school, I had a negative soccer coach. The experience was so demeaning and infuriating, it caused me to turn my back on the sport I loved for 15 years. While I could have played at a Div II college, I chose to do other things. After having my own sons and agreeing to coach their teams, I finally got past the experience. Now I try to share with young athletes, ’Don’t let a bad coach (or PE teacher) ruin a sport you love. Your passion for the sport is the critical component.’

From ScienceDaily.com…

Negative Phys Ed Teacher Can Cause a Lifetime of Inactivity

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2010) — Humiliation in physical education class as a child can turn people off fitness for good, according to a University of Alberta researcher.

Dejected Kobe Bryant

 

Billy Strean, a professor in the U of A’s Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, says a negative lifelong attitude towards physical activity can be determined by either a good or a bad experience, based on the personal characteristics of the coach or instructor. For example, negative experiences may come from a teacher who has low energy, is unfair and/or someone who embarrasses students.

During his research, Strean heard from individuals who opened up about negative experiences with coaches and instructors, some from many years ago.

One study participant wrote, “I am a 51-year-old-woman whose childhood experiences with sports, particularly as handled in school, were so negative that even as I write this my hands are sweating and I feel on the verge of tears. I have never experienced the humiliation nor felt the antipathy toward any other aspect of life as I do toward sports.”

Strean hopes to raise awareness of such experiences so those who instruct children in sport will realize they have the ability to create either a fun and playful experience or an experience of humiliation.

Strean has tips for coaches and teachers, including putting attention on fun, connecting with friends and learning, and, until kids enter their teens, minimizing attention on outcomes.

Strean also found study participants had better experiences from minimally organized games such as street hockey, compared to the more organized activities. He suggests adults try not to over-organize sports and allow the children to explore sporting activities on their own, with minimal rules and no scorekeeping.

Strean’s research was recently published in Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise.

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Alberta, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

University of Alberta (2010, January 7). Negative phys ed teacher can cause a lifetime of inactivity. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self, Inc.

Free online anger management course blog: http://drjohnblog.wordpress.com.

Free PDF of John’s award-winning self-help book available at http://www.GuideToSelf.com

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27. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From the ubiquitous ScienceDaily.com… 

Upper-Class People Have Trouble Recognizing Others’ Emotions

ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2010) — Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others.

The researchers were inspired by observing that, for lower-class people, success depends more on how much they can rely on other individuals. For example, if you can’t afford to buy support services, such as daycare service for your children, you have to rely on your neighbors or relatives to watch the kids while you attend classes or run errands, says Michael W. Kraus of the University of California-San Francisco. He co-wrote the study with Stéphane Côté of the University of Toronto and Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley.

To learn more about HOW to read emotions properly, visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com for a FREE copy of the award-winning book, Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought by U.C. Berkeley-trained emotion expert, John Schinnerer, Ph.D. Just share your email address and name for a free, instant PDF copy of the 216 page book!

One experiment used volunteers who worked at a university. Some had graduated from college and others had not; researchers used educational level as a proxy for social class. The volunteers did a test of emotion perception, in which they were instructed to look at pictures of faces and indicate which emotions each face was displaying. People with more education performed worse on the task than people with less education. In another study, university students who were of higher social standing (determined from each student’s self-reported perceptions of his or her family’s socioeconomic status) had a more difficult time accurately reading the emotions of a stranger during a group job interview.

These results suggest that people of upper-class status aren’t very good at recognizing the emotions other people are feeling. The researchers speculate that this is because they can solve their problems, like the daycare example, without relying on others — they aren’t as dependent on the people around them.

A final experiment found that, when people were made to feel that they were at a lower social class than they actually were, they got better at reading emotions. This shows that “it’s not something ingrained in the individual,” Kraus says. “It’s the cultural context leading to these differences.” He says this work helps show that stereotypes about the classes are wrong. “It’s not that a lower-class person, no matter what, is going to be less intelligent than an upper-class person. It’s all about the social context the person lives in, and the specific challenges the person faces. If you can shift the context even temporarily, social class differences in any number of behaviors can be eliminated.”

To life, love and laughter,

 John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self, Inc.

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com Hot blog on the latest in anger management tips, tools and tricks

@johnschin Follow john on Twitter

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.
________________________________________
Journal Reference:
1. M. W. Kraus, S. Cote, D. Keltner. Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy. Psychological Science, 2010; 21 (11): 1716 DOI: 10.1177/0956797610387613

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23. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From the magnificent ScienceDaily.com…

Your View of Personal Goals Can Affect Your Relationships

ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2010) — How you think about your goals — whether it’s to improve yourself or to do better than others — can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

People with “mastery goals” want to improve themselves. Maybe they want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe loop.

On the other hand, people with what psychologists call “performance goals” are trying to outperform others — to get a better grade than a friend or be Employee of the Year. Both kinds of goals can be useful in different contexts. But P. Marijn Poortvliet, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Céline Darnon, of France’s Clermont University, are interested in the social context of these goals — what they do to your relationships.

For a FREE copy of the award-winning self-improvement book, Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought, simply visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com and enter your name and email address for instant access to your very own PDF copy! Change the world by changing your self! 

Poortvliet’s work focuses on information exchange — whether people are open and honest when they are working together. “People with performance goals are more deceitful” and less likely to share information with coworkers, both in the laboratory and in real-world offices he has studied, Poortvliet says. “The reason is fairly obvious — when you want to outperform others, it doesn’t make sense to be honest about information.”

On the other hand, people who are trying to improve themselves are quite open, he says. “If the ultimate goal is to improve yourself, one way to do it is to be very cooperative with other people.” This can help improve the work environment, even though the people with these goals aren’t necessarily thinking about social relations. “They’re not really altruists, per se. They see the social exchange as a means toward the ends of self improvement.” Other research has found that people with these self-improvement goals are more open to hearing different perspectives, while people with a performance goal “would rather just say, ‘I’m just right and you are wrong.’”

It’s not always bad to be competitive, Poortvliet says. “For example, if you want to be the Olympic champion, of course it’s nice to have mastery goals and you should probably have mastery goals, but you definitely need performance goals because you want to be the winner and not the runner-up.”

But it’s important to think about how goals affect the social environment. “If you really want to establish constructive and long-lasting working relationships, then you should really balance the different levels of goals,” Poortvliet says — thinking not only about each person’s achievement, but also about the team as a whole.

Some people are naturally more competitive than others. But it’s also possible for managers to shift the kinds of goals people have by, for example, giving a bonus for the best employee. That might encourage people to set performance goals and compete against each other. On the other hand, it would also be possible to structure a bonus program to give people rewards based on their individual improvement over time.

Original article can be found by clicking here.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.

Journal Reference:
1. P. Marijn Poortvliet and Céline Darnon. Toward a More Social Understanding of Achievement Goals: The Interpersonal Effects of Mastery and Performance Goals. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2010; 19 (5): 324 DOI: 10.1177/0963721410383246

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder Guide to Self, Inc.

www.GuideToSelf.com

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com  Excellent blog on the latest anger management tools

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20. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Fantastic and uplifting reminder about the unifying power and necessity of compassion in today’s world. Compassion is the antidote to anger.

Have a compassionate weekend!

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Founder Guide to Self, Inc.
http://www.GuideToSelf.com

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18. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Does Adolescent Stress Lead to Mood Disorders in Adulthood?

ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2010) — Stress may be more hazardous to our mental health than previously believed, according to new research. A series of studies from the institution have found there may be a link between the recent rise in depression rates and the increase of daily stress.

“Major depression has become one of the most pressing health issues in both developing and developed countries,” says principle researcher Mark Ellenbogen, a professor at the Concordia Centre for Research in Human Development and a Canada Research Chair in Developmental Psychopathology.

“What is especially alarming is that depression in young people is increasing in successive generations. People are suffering from depression earlier in life and more people are getting it. We want to know why and how. We believe that stress is a major contributor.”

From parent to child Ellenbogen and colleagues are particularly interested in the link between childhood stress and the development of clinical depression and bipolar disorder. His team is evaluating the stress of children who are living in families where one parent is affected by a mood disorder.

For a free PDF copy of John’s award-winning self-help book on the latest ways to turn down stress and anxiety, visit http://www.GuidetoSelf.com and enter your name and email address for instant access to 216 pages of useful tools! 

“Previous studies have shown that kids from at-risk families are at higher risk of having a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime,” says Ellenbogen. “We know that they’re not just inheriting these traits but they are also being raised in environment that is stressful, chaotic and lacking in structure. Our goal is to tease out how this type of environment influences these children’s mental health in adolescence and adulthood.”

Cortisol, the stress hormone

To assess stress levels, Ellenbogen is measuring the levels of the stress hormone, cortisol present in the children’s saliva. Cortisol is a hormone that is produced by the body in response to stressful life events and challenges.

Ellenbogen’s recent findings have shown that the adolescent offspring of at-risk families have higher salivary cortisol levels than kids from families without disorders. What’s more, he found these elevated levels persist into young adulthood.

“Although there may be many causes to the rise in cortisol, this increase may be in part due to exposure to family stress and parenting style,” says Ellenbogen. “We have not yet confirmed that these children then go on to develop mood disorders of their own. However, we have some exciting preliminary data showing that high cortisol levels in adolescences doubles your risk for developing a serious mood disorder in young adulthood.”

We must find and disseminate ways to manage stress to large populations. This may be mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, reframing, exercise, deep breathing, self-compassion, meditation, yoga, tai chi, or any other number of possible means.

To life, love and deep breaths!

John Schinnerer Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self

For a free PDF copy of John’s award-winning self-help book on the latest ways to turn down stress and anxiety, visit http://www.GuidetoSelf.com and enter your name and email address for instant access to 216 pages of useful tools! 
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Concordia University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
________________________________________
Journal Reference:
1. Mark A Ellenbogen, Jonathan B Santo, Anne-Marie Linnen, Claire-Dominique Walker, Sheilagh Hodgins. High cortisol levels in the offspring of parents with bipolar disorder during two weeks of daily sampling. Bipolar Disorders, 2010; 12 (1): 77 DOI: 10.1111/j.1399-5618.2009.00770.x

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