Scrutinizing the Skipper: A study of leadership behaviors in the dugout.

The Coaching Behavior Assessment System was used by trained observers to classify the behaviors of coaches toward their players into 12 categories. Samples of 51 and 31 coaches in a boys' baseball program were observed during the 1976 and 1977 seasons, respectively. 867 players were interviewed at the end of the 2 seasons concerning perceptions of their coach's behaviors and attitudes toward their experience. Significant relationships were found at the team level among coaching behaviors as recorded by observers and perceived by players. The degree of punitiveness was an important factor in these relationships. Behavioral data provided by observers and players also related significantly to the won–lost record and team attitudes toward both the coach and team. Perceptions of their own behavior by coaches were unrelated to the data provided by observers and players. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sensation seeking, stress, and adolescent injuries: A test of stress-buffering, risk-taking, and coping skills hypotheses.

The potential stress-buffering effects of sensation seeking were assessed in a prospective study involving high school athletes. A significant positive relation between major negative sport-specific life events and subsequent injury time-loss occurred only for athletes low in sensation seeking. No evidence was obtained for a competing hypothesis that high sensation seeking would constitute an injury vulnerability factor by increasing risk-taking behaviors. Although low sensation seekers reported poorer stress management coping skills, there was no evidence that differences in coping efficacy mediated the injury vulnerability difference. Results indicate that sensation seeking is a stress-resiliency factor and suggest the utility of assessing relations between life stressors and outcomes that occur within the same environmental context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Quantifying gender differences in physical performance: A developmental perspective.

The purpose was to quantify the contribution of anthropometric variables to gender differences in performance during childhood and adolescence. Measures of height, percentage body fat, and fat-free body weight were obtained for 2,142 students in Grades 3, 7, and 11 (ages 9, 13, and 17 years), and the subjects were tested on 6 motor tasks. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated that performance decrements resulting from greater adiposity affects boys and girls equally. Furthermore, this male–female similarity in the degree that fatness handicaps performance holds constant across grades. Percentage-variance analyses revealed that childhood gender differences are substantially influenced by anthropometric variables, with approximately 50% of between-gender variance being accounted for by fatness alone. Boys exhibited progressively greater performance superiority from Grade 3 to Grade 11. However, for specific tasks, there was an age-related decrease in the degree to which anthropometric variables contributed to these gender differences. This prompted the conclusion that with advancing age gender differences may become increasingly more a function of environmental factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhancement of children's self-esteem through social support training for youth sport coaches.

Examined the impact of coaching behaviors on players' self-enhancement processes. Eight baseball coaches attended a preseason workshop designed to increase their supportiveness and instructional effectiveness. Behavioral guidelines were presented and modeled. A no-treatment control group had 10 coaches. 152 boys in both groups were interviewed pre- and postseason. Trained coaches differed from controls in player-perceived behaviors in accordance with the guidelines. They were evaluated more positively by their players, their players had more fun, and their teams exhibited a higher level of attraction among players, despite the fact that their teams did not differ from controls in won–lost records. Consistent with a self-esteem enhancement model, findings showed that boys with low self-esteem who played for the trained coaches exhibited significant increases in general self-esteem; low self-esteem youngsters in the control group did not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conjunctive moderator variables in vulnerability and resiliency research: Life stress, social support and coping skills, and adolescent sport injuries.

In life event research relating to vulnerability and resilience factors, single moderator variables have typically been the focus of study. Little is known about the ways in which moderator variables may interact with one another to increase vulnerability or resilience. We propose a distinction between conjunctive moderation, in which multiple moderators must co-occur in a specific combination or pattern to maximize a relation between a predictor and an outcome variable, and disjunctive moderation, in which any one of a number of moderators maximizes the predictor–criterion relation. Our results indicate that social support and psychological coping skills are statistically independent psychosocial resources and that they operate in a conjunctive manner to influence the relation between life stress and subsequent athletic injury in adolescents. Only athletes low in both coping skills and social support exhibited a significant stress–injury relation, and in that vulnerable subgroup, negative major life events accounted for up to 30% of the injury variance. Methodological considerations in the assessment of conjunctive moderator effects are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sport psychology training within a clinical psychology program and a department of intercollegiate athletics.

Many applicants to clinical and counseling psychology programs are interested in receiving the training needed to practice competently in the professional specialty area of sport psychology. In this article, the authors describe a collaborative training and service relationship between an APA-accredited clinical psychology program and an intercollegiate athletics department. Sport Psychology Services provides performance enhancement, program evaluation, and mental health services to the athletic department. In return, graduate students receive applied training, financial support, and opportunities to conduct research. The authors present program evaluation data and offer practical guidelines to graduate programs wishing to establish similar training opportunities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-esteem and children's reactions to youth sport coaching behaviors: A field study of self-enhancement processes.

Self-enhancement models posit a general motive to enhance self-regard that is believed to be particularly strong in people with low self-esteem. The authors extended previous laboratory research with college students to a field setting and studied the attraction responses of child athletes to coaches who differed in their observed behavior patterns during the sport season. Consistent with predictions derived from self-enhancement theory, children who were low in self-esteem responded most positively to coaches who were reinforcing and encouraging and most negatively to coaches who were low on this supportiveness dimension. A similar pattern was found in children's responses to technical instruction, which was regarded as instrumental to competency development and esteem enhancement. Attraction responses of moderate- and high-self-esteem children were relatively unaffected by these variations in adult leader behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)