On approach to competitive situations, affective states (emotions and anxiety) occur through the complex interaction of cognitive antecedents. Researchers have intimated that irrational beliefs might play an important role in the relationship between cognitive appraisals and affective states, but has ignored challenge and threat. In the current research, we examine the interaction between cognitive appraisals, irrational beliefs, and challenge and threat to predict golfers’ pre-competitive affective states. We adopted a cross-sectional atemporal design to examine how golfers approached two (...) different competitive situations: imagined imminent golf competition (phase 1), and actual future golf competition (phase 2). Path analysis revealed how cognitive appraisals, irrational beliefs, and challenge and threat interact to predict affective states among golfers. Serial atemporal multiple mediation analysis indicated that the relationships between cognitive appraisals and affective states were mediated by irrational beliefs and challenge and threat. Further, some differences were revealed between phase 1 and phase 2 in the serial multiple atemporal mediation results with regard to challenge. That is, at phase 1 no significant serial mediation was found for any affective outcomes, but at phase 2 significant serial mediation was found for all affective states, showing that irrational beliefs and challenge serial mediated the associations between cognitive appraisals and affective states. The finding that mediation and bivariate associations differed across phase 1 and phase 2 is echoed in the phase 1-phase 2 tests of differences. The current research makes a theoretical advancement by elucidating in more detail the complex interaction between cognitive antecedents and mediators of affective states. Specifically, the inclusion of challenge and threat alongside irrational beliefs and cognitive appraisals is an important theoretical advancement that builds on work inside of sport literature (e.g., Dixon et al., 2016 ) and outside of sport literature (e.g., David et al., 2002, 2005 ), as this constellation of theoretically related antecedents of affective states has not been examined together in the extant research. (shrink)

Cross-situational word learning, like any statistical learning problem, involves tracking the regularities in the environment. However, the information that learners pick up from these regularities is dependent on their learning mechanism. This article investigates the role of one type of mechanism in statistical word learning: competition. Competitive mechanisms would allow learners to find the signal in noisy input and would help to explain the speed with which learners succeed in statistical learning tasks. Because cross-situational word learning provides information at (...) multiple scales—both within and across trials/situations—learners could implement competition at either or both of these scales. A series of four experiments demonstrate that cross-situational learning involves competition at both levels of scale, and that these mechanisms interact to support rapid learning. The impact of both of these mechanisms is considered from the perspective of a process-level understanding of cross-situational learning. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

The notion that emotional expressions regulate social life by providing information is gaining popularity. Prior research on the effects of emotional expressions on observers’ inferential processes has focused mostly on inferences regarding the personality traits of the expresser, such as dominance and affiliation. We extend this line of research by exploring the possibility that emotional expressions shape observers’ construal of social situations. Across three vignette studies, an interaction partner's expressions of anger, compared to expressions of happiness or disappointment, led observers (...) to construe hypothetical situations as less cooperative, both in dyads and groups. These effects occurred even when factual information regarding the cooperativeness or competitiveness of the situation was provided, attesting to the power of emotional expressions in shaping the construal of social situations. Results are discussed in relation to appraisal theory, reverse appraisals, emotions as social information theory, and the emergence of cooperation in groups and cultures. (shrink)

Personality has widely been documented to play an important role in the cognitive appraisal and stress processes. Emerging studies highlight the stress mindset as a new concept that could add to the understanding of individual differences in stress experiences. This study aimed to examine the relative contribution of Big Five personality dimensions and stress mindset in accounting for measures of cognitive appraisals of stress among the competing athletes. The study was conducted on a sample of 125 collegiate athletes of both (...) genders who actively compete in sport. All the participants were regular undergraduate or graduate students at the Faculty of Kinesiology of the University of Zagreb. A questionnaire including demographic information about athletes and their sport career, stress mindset measure, situation-specific cognitive appraisal scale, sources of stress scale, and personality scale measured by IPIP-50 was administered in an online form using the Google Forms platform. Multivariate hierarchical regression procedures resulted in somewhat different predictor structures accounting for cognitive appraisals of threat, loss, and challenge, used as criterion variables. The set of Big Five personality dimensions and stress mindset measure proved to have a significant additive contribution to the explanation of each of the three cognitive appraisal criterion variances. The study results support the current body of literature suggesting a unique role of the stress mindset construct in explaining individual differences in cognitive stress appraisal among athletes above and beyond general personality dimensions. (shrink)

I consider a situation in which workers have present-biased preferences and tend to procrastinate their tasks, but underestimate the degree of self-control problems that they will face in the future. Brocas and Carrillo show that a form of competition always mitigates delay in a setting where agents are perfectly aware of their future self-control problems. However, I show that the introduction of the competition considered in their paper does not necessarily mitigate delay in a setting where agents underestimate the (...) magnitude of their future self-control problems. The intuition is that competition reinforces their belief that they will complete earlier, which undermines their incentive to complete now. This result holds even when there is only one worker who severely underestimates the degree of his or her future self-control problem, suggesting that the mere existence of a single “irrational” agent can undermine the overall performance of organizations. Moreover, the intuition behind my result implies that, to mitigate procrastination, it is important to design schemes in which workers believe that they will not complete early in the future, e.g., reducing competition over time, increasing cost over time, or even enforcing no work day tomorrow. (shrink)

Through the overall situation of athletes’ competition pressure, the pressure level of participating athletes can be understood and revealed. Analyzing the sources of stress and influencing factors of athletes can find measures to relieve and reduce stress and provide theoretical reference for the regulation of athletes’ competition pressure. Based on genetic algorithm and neural network theory, this paper proposes a method of tracing the sports competition pressure based on genetic algorithm backpropagation neural network to solve the problem that traditional (...) neural network learning algorithm is slow and easy to fall into local minimum. There is no significant difference between male and female athletes in the level of competition pressure. Athletes have the same training methods and the same goals, and the competition pressure tends to be the same, with no obvious difference; athletes with different educational backgrounds have no significant differences in training, academics, sports injuries, interpersonal relationships, social expectations, and evaluations. Due to the particularity of the stage, the competition pressure of fourth-year undergraduate and third-year masters is significantly higher than that of other grades. The number of athletes participating in college table tennis tournaments has very significant differences in competition dimensions. There is significant difference in training and self-expectation dimension difference. The competition pressure of athletes who participated in the college table tennis championship for the first time was significantly higher than that of athletes who participated repeatedly. There were significant differences between athletes before and after adapting to the venue. Before adapting to the venue, the competition pressure of athletes is generally greater. After adapting to the venue, the competition pressure of athletes has been relieved. (shrink)

This study explores the direct and interactive effects of individual differences in interpersonal trust and negotiation style on ethical decision-making processes across commonly faced negotiation situations. Individual differences influence basic ideas about legitimate negotiating behaviors, affect behavioral intentions directly, and interact with the favorability of negotiating situations, resulting in direct, indirect, and interactive effects on ethical decision-making processes. Using a sample of 298 participants in executive education workshops, the study analyzes the relationship between interpersonal trust, competitiveness, moral judgment, and behavioral (...) intentions in different negotiating conditions through a series of structural equation models and regression analyses. Our results suggest that individual difference variables exert a significant influence not only on how managers assess the morality of ethically ambiguous negotiation practices but also directly on their behavioral intentions, and that this effect changed across specific negotiation situations. We discuss these results in terms of their usefulness in explaining ethical decision-making processes in negotiations. (shrink)

In the sixth chapter of his study, Wirtschaft, Demokratie und liberaler Sozialismus, Hannes Kuch examines moral pathologies of capitalist society. He argues that such pathologies arise when learning experiences in the market lead to attitudes that have negative effects on other social spheres and undermine the democratic ethos. In this comment, I address two aspects of his thesis: its empirical foundations in behavioural economics, and the new analysis of authoritarianism that it proposes. Kuch’s diagnosis of the moral pathologies of capitalism (...) is based in part on studies in behavioural economics about the moral consequences of market relations. These studies show that market relations can lead to the erosion of moral motives for action in the long term. This tendency can be counteracted if market relations are embedded in constitutional institutions and a trust-building culture. However, the studies that Kuch discusses relate to decisions in which subjects have to choose between money and moral action or have to distribute money, and not to market relations in which competition and rivalry play a role. I argue that such competitive situations can be particularly erosive to moral relations because they pit subjects against each other. The question is whether it is possible to find effective antidotes to this erosion of moral motives. Kuch’s analysis of authoritarianism suggests that people in capitalism learn that the right of the strongest is a legitimate principle of action, and that the normalization of such principles in dealing with weaker groups plays an essential role in explaining the new authoritarianism. This is plausible. In particular, I believe that a neoliberal version of the meritocratic idea underlies this development. Subjects see themselves as winners or losers in constant status competitions, and if they are on the losing side, they compensate for the impending loss of status by oppressing weaker groups. The question is whether a less radical reaction of this kind could also threaten market socialism, because it shows subjects even more transparently than capitalism how much value their own social contribution has. Can market socialism counteract such a development? (shrink)

Deciding between different voluntary movements implies a continuous control of the competition between potential actions. Many theories postulate a leading role of prefrontal cortices in this executive function, but strong evidence exists that a motor region like the primary motor cortex is also involved, possibly via inhibitory mechanisms. This was already shown during the pre-movement decision period, but not after movement onset. For this pilot experiment we designed a new task compatible with the dynamics of post-onset control to study the (...) silent period duration, a pause in electromyographic activity after single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation that reflects inhibitory mechanisms. A careful analysis of the SP during the ongoing movement indicates a gradual increase in inhibitory mechanisms with the level of competition, consistent with an increase in mutual inhibition between alternative movement options. However, we also observed a decreased SP duration for high-competition trials associated with change-of-mind inflections in their trajectories. Our results suggest a new post-onset adaptive process that consists in a transient reduction of GABAergic inhibition within M1 for highly conflicting situations. We propose that this reduced inhibition softens the competition between concurrent motor options, thereby favoring response vacillation, an adaptive strategy that proved successful at improving behavioral performance. (shrink)

Competitive opportunity assumes limited positions of advantage. Making competitive opportunity equal without expanding opportunity would delay socialization for diminished expectations but have no advantages, thus possibly making a bad situation worse. Equal opportunity worth fighting for would be opportunity available to all non-competitively.

This work applies the competitive exclusion principle and the concept of potential competitors as simple axiomatic tools to generalized situations in ecology. These tools enable apparent competition and its dual counterpart to be explicitly evaluated in poorly understood ecological systems. Within this set-theory framework we explore theoretical symmetries and invariances, De Morgan’s laws, frozen evolutionary diversity and virtual processes. In particular, we find that the exclusion principle compromises the geometrical growth of the number of species. By theoretical extending this (...) principle, we can describe interspecific depredation in the dual case. This study also briefly considers the debated situation of intraspecific competition. The ecological consequences of our findings are discussed; particularly, the use of our framework to reinterpret coupled mathematical differential equations describing certain ecological processes. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Sind Wettbewerbstrukturen tatsächlich günstig für Minderheiten, weil sie Diskriminierungsprozessen entgegenwirken? Diese zentrale sozialwissenschaftliche These wird in diesem Beitrag am Fall der Migranten im deutschen Ligenfußball empirisch überprüft. Es wird argumentiert, dass das Anwendungsfeld nahezu ideale Randbedingungen für einen Test liefert, da die relevanten Kapitalien nicht spezifisch für bestimmte Gesellschaften sind und da der Konkurrenzkampf in besonderer Weise institutionalisiert und legitimiert ist. Mit Daten der „Mannheimer Fußballstudie“ wird dann gezeigt, dass sich wichtige Folgerungen aus der Wettbewerbsthese grundsätzlich bestätigen lassen. Insbesondere (...) kann nachgewiesen werden, dass die sozialen Distanzen von Mitspielern, die subjektiv empfundenen Diskriminierungen der Migranten selbst sowie Benachteiligungen durch Jugendtrainer umso geringer sind, je höher das Ligenniveau - und damit der Konkurrenzdruck - ist. Somit kann durch die Wahl des Anwendungsfeldes ‘Sport’ ein seltener und wichtiger empirischer Befund für die Integrationsforschung im Allgemeinen geliefert werden. (shrink)

The present research aimed to provide a more holistic analysis of stressful experiences in sport by examining how stress appraisal, coping and emotion are dynamically inter-related constructs and the extent to which their dynamic relationship is associated with objective performance. Based on process-oriented methods, two studies were conducted with elite athletes in order to investigate the dynamic relationship between these constructs and performance in highly demanding sport situations (Study 1: simulated competitive fencing matches during a training session; Study 2: (...) real-life competitive fencing matches during an international competition). The results of the random coefficient regression models emphasise the dynamic nature of the relationship between stress appraisal, coping behaviour, emotion and objective performance over the course of fencing matches. They allowed identification of additional mediating effects of coping and emotion within dynamic relationships between stress appraisal and performance. These studies contribute to a deeper understanding of psychological adaptation in performance environments. The implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the design of effective coping interventions to support the learning of performance-related coping skills and the attainment of performance goals among individuals in highly demanding environments. (shrink)

Ultimate is a competitive team sport that is played, even at the highest level of competition, without external referees. The key to Ultimate as a self-refereed sport is the so-called ‘Spirit of the Game’. As this paper aims to show, the Spirit of the Game closely resembles Habermas’s theory of communicative action. This suggests that Habermas’s theory might be used to spell out the philosophical presuppositions of the Spirit of the Game. Most importantly, the requirements for players to serve (...) as referees of their own game specified in the ‘Rules of Ultimate’ turn out to be reformulation of the four validity claims of communicative action. Moreover, the Spirit of the Game can be interpreted as aiming towards facilitating real-life decision-making procedures that resemble as much as possible Habermas’s concept of an ideal speech situation. On the other hand, Ultimate might serve as a case study for exploring how Habermas’s idea of rational deliberation works in the practice of a competitive sporting environment. Most importantly, it makes manifest that self-refereeing is a trust-based system. This suggests that communicative rationality can only unfold its power—the unforced force of the better argument—within a context in which participants trust that everyone participates in good faith towards the common goal of finding the best decision. Hence, investigating the case of Ultimate allows us to draw broader conclusions about the requirements for rational deliberation to work in practice. (shrink)

Men typically express more willingness than women to perpetrate fraudulent acts like lying in negotiations. However, women express just as much willingness in some cases. We develop and test a theory to explain these mixed findings. Specifically, we hypothesize that situational cues that bring about competitive or empathic feelings mitigate sex differences in lying to negotiation counterparts. Results from four experiments confirm our hypotheses. Experiment 1 showed that men and women express equal willingness to lie when negotiating with counterparts (...) toward whom they felt either great competitiveness or empathy. Experiment 2 extended these results by confirming that men only express more willingness to lie absent competitive or empathic feelings towards a counterpart. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that inducing competitive or empathic feelings toward a counterpart eliminated sex differences in lying by leading women to lie more and men to lie less, respectively. Overall, our results suggest that the extent to which negotiators experience competitive or empathic feelings play important roles in whether sex differences in lying in negotiations emerge. (shrink)

This paper examines the institutional and social dimensions of cooperation in the Alliance of Science Organisations, the central corporatist stakeholder in German science policy, in the 1970s and 1980s, which were a crucial period for this committee. In doing so, this essay mainly focuses on the way science organizations interact with each other, as well as with national politics. The Federal Ministry of Research invited the Alliance to regular meetings and thereby fostered its involvement into political decision-making processes. Consequently, the (...) question of who belonged to the Alliance came into the focus of different players. Although the members of the Alliance themselves decided on the composition of their committee, they were not able to completely insulate themselves from external demands. Including new members into the Alliance had a destabilizing effect on the carefully balanced distribution of power within this committee, as will be shown through the case study on the admission of the Association of the Major Research Centers in 1976. In order to restabilize the situation, the members of the Alliance tried to exclude the AGF from certain issues. At the same time, the AGF itself was keen on being regarded as an equal partner and thus strove for its inclusion. This complex interplay of cooperative and competitive actions finally resulted in the institutionalization of the Alliance.ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die institutionelle und soziale Dimension der Zusammenarbeit in der Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen, dem zentralen korporatistischen Akteur in der bundesdeutschen Wissenschaftspolitik, in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren, einer wichtigen Scharnierphase für dieses Gremium. Dabei liegt der Fokus insbesondere auf der Analyse der vielfältigen Interaktionen zwischen den Wissenschaftsorganisationen, ebenso wie zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik.Um seine forschungspolitische Agenda mit den Wissenschaftsorganisationen abzustimmen, etablierte das Bundesforschungsministerium regelmäßige Konsultationen mit den Präsidenten der Allianz, die eine verstärkte Einbindung des Gremiums in politische Entscheidungsfindungsprozesse zur Folge hatte. Folglich rückte auch die Zusammensetzung der Allianz immer wieder in den Fokus verschiedener Akteure. Obwohl die Allianz prinzipiell selbst über ihre Zusammensetzung entschied, konnte sie sich nicht gänzlich gegenüber von außen an sie herangetragenen Forderungen verschließen, was zu Öffnungen des Gremiums führte – wie im Falle der Aufnahme der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Großforschungseinrichtungen 1976. Das wiederum wirkte destabilisierend auf das zuvor sorgfältig austarierte Machtverhältnis in der Allianz. Um die Situation zu restabilisieren, initiierten die Allianzmitglieder von innen heraus gegenüber der AGF in bestimmten Fragen partielle Schließungen, die allerdings erneute Öffnungen nach sich zogen, da die AGF selbst darum bemüht war, als gleichberechtigter Partner in der Allianz agieren zu können. Dieses komplexe Zusammenspiel von kooperativen und kompetitiven Handlungsmodi resultierte schlussendlich in einer Institutionalisierung und Festigung der Allianz. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the phenomenological approach to expertise as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus and to give an account of the extent to which their approach may contribute to a better understanding of how athletes may use their cognitive capacities during high-level skill execution. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's non-representational view of experience-based expertise implies that, given enough relevant experience, the skill learner, when expert, will respond intuitively to immediate situations with no recourse to deliberate actions (...) or mental representations. The paper will subsequently outline some implications and consequences of such an approach and will also examine to what extent Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill model is capable to resist different attacks that have been made against their view, and in particular regarding the practical application of their approach to the skill domain of competitive sport. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years decision making research in team invasion sport has been dominated by three research perspectives,information processing,ecological dynamics, andnaturalistic decision making. Recently, attempts have been made to integrate perspectives, as conceptual similarities demonstrate the decision making process as an interaction between a players perception of game information and the individual and collective capability to act on it. Despite this, no common ground has been found regarding what connects perception and action during performance. The differences between perspectives rest (...) on the role of stored mental representations, that may, or may not facilitate the retrieval of appropriate responses in time pressured competitive environments. Additionally, in team invasion sports like rugby union, the time available to players to perceive, access memory and act, alters rapidly between specific game situations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine theoretical differences and the mechanisms that underpin them, through the vehicle of rugby union. Sixteen semi-elite rugby union players took part in two post-game procedures to explore the following research objectives; (i) to consider how game situations influence players perception of information; (ii) to consider how game situations influence the application of cognitive mechanisms whilst making decisions; and (iii) to identify the influence of tactics and/or strategy on player decision making. Deductive content analysis and elementary units of meaning derived from self-confrontation elicitation interviews indicate that specific game situations such as; the lineout, scrum or open phases of play or the tackle situation in attack or defence all provide players with varying complexity of perceptual information, formed through game information and time available to make decisions. As time increased, players were more likely to engage with task-specific declarative knowledge-of the game, stored as mental representations. As time diminished, players tended to diagnose and update their knowledge-in the game in a rapid fashion. Occasionally, when players described having no time, they verbalised reacting on instinct through a direct connection between perception and action. From these findings, clear practical implications and directions for future research and dissemination are discussed. (shrink)

People often judge trustworthiness based on others’ faces (e.g., facial expression and facial gender). However, it is unclear whether social context plays a moderating role in forming trustworthiness judgments. Based on the emotions as social information (EASI) model, differing contexts may impact the effect of facial expression; however, there is no evidence demonstrating that differing contexts will or will not influence the effect of facial gender. In this study, we used two experiments to examine how facial expression and facial gender (...) affect facial trustworthiness judgments and whether the effects on facial trustworthiness judgments are consistent in cooperative and competitive settings. Twenty-seven undergraduates (14 female; Mage = 21.81 years, SD = 2.66) participated in experiment 1. The results showed significant main effects of facial expression and facial gender as well as the interaction between them. To examine the social context effect, 28 undergraduates (18 female; Mage = 20.93 years, SD = 2.94) participated in experiment 2. The results showed the main effects of facial expression, facial gender, and social context. Moreover, there was a significant interaction between facial gender and facial expression and a marginally significant interaction between social context and facial expression. These results suggest that in the process of judging facial trustworthiness, individuals’ judgments are affected by both facial expression and facial gender. Furthermore, the effect of facial gender on facial trustworthiness judgments presents cross-situational stability, and the role of facial expression is influenced by the settings. These findings support and expand the EASI model. (shrink)

When a person engages in a "game," that person may reason and behave in a manner that is inconsistent with non-game-situation moral reasoning. In this study we measured moral reasoning with the Defining Issues Test (DIT). We then engaged the students in a competitive game and collected accounts of their "reasoning" by having them explain their decisions with a forced choice inventory. The results indicate that there were significant inconsistencies in moral reasoning between non-game and game situations. The (...) implications of this for business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Public, private, non-profit and for-profit nursing education enterprises in the U.S. are competing with one another in a newly complex and volatile educational landscape, placing academic leaders into situations fraught with moral, ethical and legal compromise with few precedents for guidance. This case study provides a richly contextualized narrative exploration of ethical and legal challenges to one leader’s moral courage, a fictionalized exploration drawn from multiple sources over time, to form a composite that is nonetheless firmly rooted in the complexity (...) and competitiveness characteristic of nursing education today. Our purpose is three-fold: 1) to direct the reader to moral and ethical questions that require thoughtful discourse and analysis among current and future academic nursing leaders; 2) to raise the issue of the need for regulations and oversight that reflect the changing realities of today’s increasingly complex and competitive educational arena; and 3) to encourage nursing education leaders to share additional cases that resonate for them, and in so doing, to expand the wellspring of ideas from which we can all draw in becoming more effective and morally courageous leaders. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to examine the interactive effects of situational variables on teams’ technical performance in the UEFA Champion League. Match data of 19 technical actions and events were collected and classified into three groups during eight seasons. Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to identify the differences in the technical performances among teams. Results showed that the significant differences in the technical performance between the group stage and the knockout stage were only found in dribble and (...) yellow card. However, differences in the variables related to goal scoring and offense were more significant than in the variables related to defense under the comparisons across competition situations, and the differences in the variables related to defense were mainly detected in the yellow card. The number of variables that showed significant differences among match location and match outcome in the group stage were less than in the knockout stage. Therefore, the identified key performance indicators by considering the interactive effects of situational variables may provide detailed and practical insights for coaches to develop useful training interventions and match strategies for upcoming match playing in specific competition situations. (shrink)

It is well established that gratitude favours prosocial tendencies in neutral and amicable social interactions. Less is clear, however, about the role of gratitude in threatening situations that br...

The domestic situation of the past few years shows the practices of employees’ unpaid leave and layoffs and the constant drain on capital, talent, and technologies in hospitality. Owners expect to reduce the losses to as low as possible by saving on human costs. Nevertheless, in face of such a changing environment, hospitality has to accumulate high-quality human capital through systematic investment, sensitive development, and continuous learning and growth to discover competitive advantages through the cultivation of human capital. (...) The pre-service education of new employees could accelerate their familiarity with the operations of the company and their understanding of their job role and duties. More importantly, with good planning, it could make employees feel emphasized with and respected with the result of largely changing their thoughts and working habits. Aiming at supervisors and employees in hospitality in Zhejiang as the research objects, a total of 420 copies of our questionnaire are distributed, and 357 valid copies were retrieved, with a retrieval rate of 85%. According to the results to propose discussions, it is expected to generate systematic and proper education methods for the pre-service education in hospitality, promote the education effectiveness, and promote employees’ capability and organizational performance. (shrink)

The contemporary global language “extinction crisis” has been analyzed by several influential linguists using concepts from ecology. In this article we study different reaction-diffusion models to explain the dynamics of language competition. We are mainly interested in situations where one language has a status advantage compared with the other. We consider previous applications of competition models from ecology, with particular attention to the implications of the “carrying capacity” term in such models. We derive existence as well as stability conditions for (...) the equilibria of the models considered, and show that depending on environmental conditions both situations—coexistence of competing languages or extinction of the less advantageous language—are possible. (shrink)

This paper presents a new model for how the voting worked at the Athenian dramatic competitions, and demonstrates its viability mathematically. Previous proposals have either failed to take full account of the ancient sources or have not considered all the possible permutations of judging results. As is generally recognized, ten votes were cast, but in most circumstances not all were counted. Sections I-IV consider the tragic competition at the Dionysia, in which three competitors vied for the prize. For the questions (...) we consider, two likely cases are examined (when the votes are divided 4-3-3 and 5-3-2), then a random distribution covering all possible cases, and finally the situation when two competitors are favoured against a third (when the votes are divided 5-5-0, 5-4-1 and 4-4-2). Section I presents the proposal and situates it within the Athenian cultural context. Section II asks how many lots are typically drawn before a victory is obtained. Section III considers how other places are determined. Section IV introduces the question of 'fairness': does the person who receives the most votes actually win? Section V considers adjudication for comedies and at the Lenaia. Section VI considers dithyrambic competitions. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive explanation for the likely failure in the decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation, and also intends to offer perspectives on the new role of competition in a steady state or a degrowth economy. The analysis is based on five different scenarios, and uses the European Union as an example. It is concluded that we must prepare ourselves for a potential incompatibility between sustainability and economic growth. In this respect one can say that (...) the current EU situation is in some ways already quite close to an economic system without growth, although far from sustainable as yet. Two of the four perspectives developed, regarding the new role of competition in an economy without growth, indicate an increase of direct and indirect competition over resources. The other two perspectives point out that regulatory public intervention as well as financial intervention will increase in order to ensure that - despite the revised role of competition - the poorest are still given a chance to develop (e.g. through basic minimum incomes), even in a degrowth economy. (shrink)

In Bangladesh due to improved quality of life the number of people over 60 years is increasing rapidly. This should be seen as an emerging challenge as the elderly will have special needs and require different care-giving services. Since Bangladesh does not have a social welfare system there will be competition for inadequate resources specially health and medical services. It is envisaged that due to more elderly population the demographic structure will undergo a slow change from the present pyramid structure. (...) The growing trend towards nuclear family or where children live abroad will put the elderly parents in a dilemma-the financial and social support that is essential for them has not yet emerged. The nutrition and health status of elderly people depend on adequate food safe water, proper sanitation facilities and maintaining hygienic standards. To provide special medical care for the elderly there is a need to establish WHO recommended Age-Friendly Primary Health Care centers and separate wards /units are to be set up in the hospitals. To reduce vulnerability of older women there is a need to distribute assets and properties according to the law.. Our new generations have to be responsive, informed and attentive about their duties and responsibilities towards the elderly people. Taking proper care of the elderly is our ethical duty and responsibility. (shrink)

The latest research in Spain indicates that the most advanced neuromarketing consulting companies in the sector are those that have been able to innovate in the development of their own technologies and methodologies. Despite their reduced volume of business compared to total investment in Marketing and market research in our country, there are signs that suggest these companies have great potential to improve this sector, which is still to be explored. For this reason, this research straddling the ethnographic method and (...) the theoretical-descriptive method, aims to help us better understand the characteristic features of this sector by actively listening to the professional voices that lead it. Its epistemological value lies in its contribution to understanding the business culture related to the professional development of neuromarketing in our country today. The study shows that the main human resources strategy of neuromarketing consulting companies is based on the creation of multidisciplinary work teams. In addition, most of them develop data analysis software, which they can safeguard under various types of copy right, and on other occasions they manage to patent them, to later apply them to the objectives and purposes of their company. This would also explain the widespread use of certain procedures and resources by the vast majority of the consulting companies investigated. Thus, the trend in the market is the implementation of different synchronization software to the available technological and methodological resources. Others have even gone so far as to create a new technological support to incorporate methodologies already in use. Therefore, this gives them exclusivity in their services and the necessary competitive advantage over their competitors. Among other factors, these inferences about how this sector really works are very likely to be very useful in the academic field, which will constitute a further step in generating critical thinking and in expanding the frontiers of knowledge around this disciplin. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce a theory on the dynamic development of affective processes, affect regulation, and the relationship between emotions and sport performance. The theory focusses on how affective processes emerge and develop during competitive sport involvement. Based on Scherer’s component process model, we postulate six components of emotion that interact with each other in a circular fashion: triggering processes, physiological reactions, action tendencies, expressive behaviors, subjective experience, and higher cognitive processes. The theory stresses the dynamics of affective (...) processes and describes the consequences for performance in competitive sports. It assumes that the peculiarities of different sports must be taken into account in order to understand the affective processes, and offers starting points on which strategies can be used to effectively regulate affective states. Consequences for research and practice are derived and discussed. To study the development of affective processes, future research should test the assumptions in ecologically valid contexts, such as real competitions or competition-like situations, using multi-component measures of emotions. (shrink)

The article develops the idea of forming postcapitalist social relations as a social revolution of an individual, which consists in the fact that popularity becomes a key advantage, the “possession” of which is a desired goal and a significant resource of political influence. At the same time, it is shown that this process leads to forming a new dominant stratum — personalities (“people with personality”): celebrities, popular bloggers, social media influencers, micro- and nanosignature. It is substantiated that the personaliat domination (...) is a consequence of contradictory social relations between the new aristocracy represented by the representatives of the personaliat and many people who do not “possess” a popular personality - the impersonaliat (“extra people”, “lower” precariat, those who turn out to be outsiders in the world of social platforms). This contradiction is associated with the rooting of a celebrity’s culture, which encourages a lot of people to fight for popularity and focus on finding advantageous differences from others in the process of self-realization. However, this struggle in the end for the overwhelming majority turns into an increase in creative competition and subtraction. Various new forms of subtraction that appear in situations of widespread self-realization are revealed. Accordingly, arguments are given in favor of the fact that in the context of the “personality revolution”, the truly left will be rather an alternative that will call into question the ways of solving social problems formulated by popular personalities. In other words, it will be possible to oppose the total pursuit of popularity with the projects of society, in which the person is relied not as someone who rises above the others, but as an involved person who values life in harmony with others higher than his own “I”. (shrink)

In a Mental Imagery Brain-Computer Interface the user has to perform a specific mental task that generates electroencephalography components, which can be translated in commands to control a BCI system. The development of a high-performance MI-BCI requires a long training, lasting several weeks or months, in order to improve the ability of the user to manage his/her mental tasks. This works aims to present the design of a MI-BCI combining mental imaginary and cognitive tasks for a severely motor impaired user, (...) involved in the BCI race of the Cybathlon event, a competition of people with severe motor disability. In the BCI-race, the user becomes a pilot in a virtual race game against up to three other pilots, in which each pilot has to control his/her virtual car by his/her mental tasks. We present all the procedures followed to realize an effective MI-BCI, from the user's first contact with a BCI technology to actually controlling a video-game through her EEG. We defined a multi-stage user-centered training protocol in order to successfully control a BCI, even in a stressful situation, such as that of a competition. We put a specific focus on the human aspects that influenced the long training phase of the system and the participation to the competition. (shrink)

Male-male competition is involved in inter- and intrasexual selection, with both endocrine and psychological factors presumably contributing to reproductive success in human males. We examined relationships among men’s naturally occurring testosterone, their self-perceived mate value, self-esteem, sociosexuality, and expected likelihood of approaching attractive women versus situations leading to child involvement. We then monitored changes in these measures in male rowers from Cambridge, UK, following a manipulated “win” or “loss” as a result of an indoor rowing contest. Baseline results revealed that (...) men with heightened testosterone and SPMV values typically had greater inclinations toward engaging in casual sexual relationships and a higher likelihood of approaching attractive women in a hypothetical social situation. As anticipated, both testosterone and SPMV increased following a manipulated “victory” and were associated with heightened sociosexuality, and increased expectations toward approaching attractive women versus individuals who would involve them in interacting with children after the race. SPMV and self-esteem appeared to mediate some of the effects of testosterone on post-race values. These findings are considered in the broader context of individual trade-offs between mating and parental effort and a model of the concurrent and dynamic androgenic and psychological influences contributing to male reproductive effort and success. (shrink)

This article discusses how technological official aids influence sporting competitions in terms of fairness and flow. It addresses the main arguments against technological official aids used to assist refereeing in binary referee situations. First, I argue that the criticism directed at the use of ball tracking devices (‘reconstructed track devices’) is mainly unjustified and that these devices provide the opportunity to make refereeing in certain types of sport fairer. In this regard, I also argue that empirical findings about referees’ decision-making (...) and potential biases must be considered when deciding how technological official aids influence the fairness of sporting competitions. Then I attempt to refute the argument that no situations are more decisive than others in sports with no fixed breaks, such as football. Finally, I scrutinise the argument that human fallibility in refereeing is somehow valuable in itself. Consequently, this article concludes that there are no convincing arguments against the use of technological official aids in binary referee situations. (shrink)

This paper set out to provide a skeptical perspective to the view that IT has the potential to bring people into the global community. While not doubting the merits of IT’s capabilities it proposed that such claims be qualified in view of disparities in the distribution of wealth between nations and between peoples. It focused attention on the plight of students at the University of Fort Hare, in the Eastern Cape, which is the poorest of South Africa’s nine provinces. It (...) argued instead that IT has the likelihood of accentuating instead of bridging existing inequalities in wealth between countries and between peoples. It contended that not‘everybody’ is predisposed to becoming a role player in the global agenda given that access to IT and online facilities is stratified by income. This, the paper posited, is most likely to exacerbate the "global digital divide"—the growing disparity in wealth between countries of the North and the South, and between peoples, the information "haves" and "have-nots". The U.S.’s 1999 expenditure on IT, which stood at $762 as opposed to South Africa’s expenditure in the same year, which was $10.6, illustrates the "divide". But while on the surface the University of Fort Hare’s situation seemed very gloomy, the paper outlined positive, but modest initiatives not only to provide access to IT and online facilities, but also to quip staff and students with requisite skills to enable them to be role players in the global agenda. (shrink)

This study details the methodological process for creating a tool for the identification of COVID-19 potential contagion situations in sports and physical education before, during, and after practice and competition. It is a tool that implies an educational and methodological process with all the agents of the sports system. This tool identifies the large number of interactions occurring through sports action and everything that surrounds it in training, competition, and organization. The aim is to prepare contingency protocols based on an (...) exhaustive analysis, risk detection, and proposal of contingency measures trying to reduce the residual risk to a minimum. In the second part, the results of the implementation of this tool in the sports system of Galicia (Spain) are shown. The technicians have changed their perceptions about the coronavirus transmission in sports. They highlight the problem for returning to sports participation for athletes under 18 years in the pandemic context. (shrink)

This article draws upon concepts developed in recent empirical and theoretical work on high skilled and academic mobility and migration including accidental mobility, forced mobility and negotiated mobility. These concepts inform a situated, qualitative study of mobility among international postdoctoral researchers in life sciences and engineering fields who were employed at US and UK universities in 2008 and 2009. Informed by epistemological methods in the Foucauldian tradition of discourse and governmentality, the study explores how policy discourse and technologies empower and (...) limit scientists and engineers in negotiating employment arrangements across national boundaries. (shrink)

. All personal that belong to a company, has to be consider into their daily agenda theoptimization of the inventory, in matter of create a cost reduction into the organization, an finallyincrement the productivity.The inventory is the element that gives “live” to the companies, in the moment to be manufacturedinto a product, through the works stations, is the case, that the excess of inventory will force thecompany not invert into development, research, training, technology, etc., and this situation willaffect competiveness, (...) and take the risk of be out of the market.The clients pay for a good, with a competitiveness price, excellent quality, and complete all thespecification that they request, plus has to be deliver on time; our responsibility is do wherever ittakes to guaranty the mayor percentage of efficiency in all our process and complete the goal ofsatisfy our clients.Keywords. Competitiveness, cost, inventory management, productivity.Resumen. Todo el personal estratégico, administrativo y operativo perteneciente a una empresa,debe considerar dentro de su agenda diaria la optimización de la gestión de los inventarios,permitiendo con ello un impacto en la reducción los costos de la organización, que se traducirá en unincremento de la productividad.El inventario es el elemento que permite dar vida a las empresas, al momento de ser transformada enun producto, a través de todas las estaciones de trabajo dando paso a paso un valor agregado, sinembargo el exceso de los inventarios ocasiona que la organización no pueda en incurrir en gastos quepermitan el desarrollo y crecimiento, como son las áreas de investigación y desarrollo, capacitación yadiestramiento, tecnología, mercadotecnia, etc., trayendo en consecuencia perder el nivel decompetitividad, y con ello correr el riesgo de quedar desplazado por la competencia.Los clientes pagan por producto que presente un precio competitivo; de la más alta calidad; quecumpla con todas y cada una de sus especificaciones; que sea entregado en tiempo y forma; esnuestra responsabilidad como estrategas, administradores y operadores de los inventarios, elgarantizar el mayor porcentaje de eficiencia en los procesos productivos y administrativos, demanera de lograr el fin último de toda empresa tiene, satisfacer a sus clientes.Palabras claves. Administración de inventarios, competitividad, costos, productividad. (shrink)

This article discusses how technological official aids influence sporting competitions in terms of fairness and flow. It addresses the main arguments against technological official aids used to assist refereeing in binary referee situations. First, I argue that the criticism directed at the use of ball tracking devices (‘reconstructed track devices’) is mainly unjustified and that these devices provide the opportunity to make refereeing in certain types of sport fairer. In this regard, I also argue that empirical findings about referees’ decision-making (...) and potential biases must be considered when deciding how technological official aids influence the fairness of sporting competitions. Then I attempt to refute the argument that no situations are more decisive than others in sports with no fixed breaks, such as football. Finally, I scrutinise the argument that human fallibility in refereeing is somehow valuable in itself. Consequently, this article concludes that there are no convincing arguments against the use of technological official aids in binary referee situations. (shrink)

Collective action, or the large-scale cooperation in the pursuit of public goods, has been suggested to have evolved through cultural group selection. Previous research suggests that the costly punishment of group members who do not contribute to public goods plays an important role in the resolution of collective action dilemmas. If large-scale cooperation sustained by the punishment of defectors has evolved through the mechanism of cultural group selection, two implications regarding costly punishment follow: (1) that people are more willing to (...) punish defecting group members in a situation of intergroup competition than in a single-group social dilemma game and (2) that levels of “perverse” punishment of cooperators are not affected by intergroup competition. We find confirmation for these hypotheses. However, we find that the effect of intergroup competition on the punishment of defectors is fully explained by the stronger conditionality of punishment on expected punishment levels in the competition condition. (shrink)

Background: Studies of sexual conditioning typically focus on the development of conditioned responses to a stimulus that precedes and has become associated with a sexual unconditioned stimulus (US). Such a sexually conditioned stimulus (CS) provides the opportunity for feed-forward regulation of sexual behavior, which improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the sexual activity. Objective and Design: The present experiments were conducted to provide evidence of such feed-forward regulation of sexual behavior in laboratory studies with domesticated quail by measuring how many (...) fertilized eggs were produced by the female after the sexual encounter. During the conditioning phase, male and female quail received a conditioned stimulus paired with the opportunity to copulate with each other. Results: Sexual conditioning increased the number of eggs that were fertilized as a consequence of copulation, especially if both the male and the female were exposed to the sexual CS. This conditioned fertility effect occurred with a range of CS durations and CS types. The conditioned fertility effect also occurred in situations involving sexual competition. When two males copulated with the same female, DNA fingerprinting showed that the male whose sexual encounter was signaled by a sexual CS was responsible for most of the resulting offspring. Sexual conditioning also reduced the first-male disadvantage in fertilization that occurs when two males copulate with the same female separated by several hours. Another significant finding was that sexual conditioning attenuated the usual drop in fertilization rate that occurs when the same male copulates with two females in succession. Conclusion: These results show that sexual conditioning increases the number of offspring that are produced in both isolated male-female encounters and in situations that involve two males copulating with the same female or one male copulating with more than one female. By increasing fertilization rates, sexual conditioning can alter genetic transmission across generations and shape evolutionary change. Keywords: sexual conditioning; sexual learning; conditioned fertility; sexual competition; quail; pavlovian conditioning (Published: 15 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 17333 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17333. (shrink)

This paper researches and analyzes the evaluation of the competitiveness of ice and snow tourism, uses the improved fuzzy neural network algorithm to process the system flow diagram of ice and snow tourism development through the function and characteristics of the power system of ice and snow tourism, and finally selects more than 40 indicators of the three subsystems of resources, economy, and culture. Based on the construction of cloud fuzzy neural network model, the above method is used for experimental (...) comparison analysis, and experiments are conducted through University of California Irvine dataset and engineering examples to compare with the traditional cloud model, fuzzy neural network, and BP neural network to analyze the operation efficiency, accuracy rate, and several rules of the algorithm. Through the experimental comparative analysis, the cloud fuzzy neural network can fully take into account the randomness and fuzziness of the data, optimize the generation of cloud rules, avoid multidimensional rule disasters, and ensure the operational efficiency of the algorithm; the accuracy rate of the algorithm is improved relative to that of the traditional technology, and it applies to a variety of datasets. And the software is used to test the ice and snow tourism industry system dynamics model to realize the correctness and robustness testing of the model. After the constructed model can reflect the real situation within the error range, the final policy simulation of the model is carried out. (shrink)

This study attempts to refine and test a theory of social influences on ethical decisions of journalists. The theoretical model proposes that several social factors influence any given decision, and that a hierarchy of influences assigns relative value to each: individual, small group, organization, competition, occupation, extramedia, and law. Print and broadcast journalists reacted to 3 hypothetical scenarios that raised ethical problems. The journalists then rated the salience of various reasoning statements, each representing 1 of the 7 social influences. No (...) single source of ethical guidance appeared; in many cases different influences emerge as powerful under different circumstances. But of the 7 proposed influences, 5 showed consistent strength in predicting the decision the journalist makes. The individual influence was the weakest of the 7, despite its prominent strength in the literature. The organizational and small-group strength suggests company-level strategies for media policy-makers who wish to increase journalists'ethical awareness. Overall, the study seems to challenge a traditional assumption that in ethical dilemmas journalists are autonomous moral agents, acting on the basis of their own values alone. The data support the notion of a far more dynamic and complex pattern of social influences. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to analyze the association between coaches’ experience and their perceptions on the implementation of a long-term athletic development model created in 2016 by the Portuguese Swimming Federation. Eighty-six swimming coaches were assembled in groups according to their experience level: “novice”, “intermediate”, and “experienced”, and they answered a questionnaire with the following items: awareness of the existing model acceptance usefulness for practice, and implementation of this model by their peers. Regardless of experience, ~67% of the (...) coaches were aware of the model. Among those, a large number showed acceptance and confidence in its usefulness for their daily practice. Most coaches showed concerns about the fact that their peers do not respect the model frameworks, declaring the search for their swimmers’ immediate success as the main cause for such behavior. The results also showed an association between experience and knowledge about the model’s existence [χ2 = 10.223, p < 0.01, V = 0.345], and experienced coaches exhibited better knowledge than their intermediate [χ2 = 9.555, p < 0.01, V = 0.393] or novice [χ2 = 5.926, p = 0.02, V = 0.314] counterparts. While there was an association between the coaches’ experience and knowledge about the LTAD model’s existence, this situation does not seem to influence the way coaches accept and understand the usefulness of the model for their daily practice. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo defende o reconhecimento da relevância das variáveis geográficas para a prática do esporte eletrônico (esport). A discussão apresentada está situada na intersecção entre a geografia do esporte e a geografia da internet e é orientada por literatura anterior dos Game Studies. Os dados empíricos foram obtidos em um estudo longitudinal de jogadores semiprofissionais da cidade de Belém, na Amazônia, realizado entre os anos de 2017 e 2019, cujos resultados convergem com dados sobre a internet brasileira disponibilizados pelo (...) Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil. A análise do material disponível indica a presença de mediações espaciais coerentes com os três eixos dos estudos da Geografia: físico, tecnológico e cultural. O espaço físico impõe dificuldades na distância em relação às cidades que são sedes de campeonatos, nacionais e internacionais, bem como para adquirir equipamentos. Essa última é também uma mediação técnica, pois tem reflexos sobre a qualidade do hardware utilizado pelos jogadores. A mediação tecno-espacial mais evidente diz respeito à qualidade das conexões de internet disponíveis nos diferentes locais. Os fatores da geografia humana incluem questões étnicas, de classe social e de gênero, bem como outros aspectos culturais. As primeiras foram identificadas na literatura pré-existente sobre esports, enquanto outros aspectos culturais apareceram de forma clara entre os dados do estudo apresentado.Palavras-chave: Esports; Espaço; Geografia.Abstract: This paper argues for the recognition of the relevance of geographical variables for the practice of electronic sports (esports). The discussion presented is situated at the intersection between Sport Geography and Internet Geography and is guided by previous Game Studies literature. The empirical data comes from a longitudinal study of semi-professional players from the city of Belém, in the Amazon, conducted between 2017 and 2019. The results of that study converge with data about the Brazilian internet provided by Brazilian Internet Steering Committee. The analysis of this material indicates the presence of spatial mediations coherent with the three axes of Geography studies: physical, technological and cultural. The difficulties coming from physical space are related to the distance between the location of the players and the cities that host national and international championships, as well as the centers from which hardware is acquired. The latter is also a technical mediation, as it constrains the quality of the equipment used by the players. The most prominent techno-spatial mediation is the quality of the internet connections available at different places. Human geography factors include ethnic, social class and gender issues as well as other cultural factors. The first and second were identified in the existing literature about esports, the latter figured in the results of the study presented.Keywords: Esports; Space; Geography. (shrink)

IThe so-called enterprise or commercial-bureaucratic university has been with us for some time. To its advocates, it has set higher education on a rational footing and demystified the folkways of cosseted intellectuals. To its detractors, it galls the kibe. For observers and stakeholders alike, the age of the office has introduced a new way of thinking and speaking in campus boardrooms and action sessions. The idiom of markets and corporations—How competitive are we? What are the anticipated returns on investment? (...) Where can payroll efficiencies be found?—frames an instrumental, quantifiable understanding of the vita academica. Corporate clients need to decide…. (shrink)

The article investigates the interplay of moral rules in computer simulation. The investigation is based on two situations which are well-known to game theory: the prisoner''s dilemma and the game of Chicken. The prisoner''s dilemma can be taken to represent contractual situations, the game of Chicken represents a competitive situation on the one hand and the provision for a common good on the other. Unlike the rules usually used in game theory, each player knows the other''s strategy. In (...) that way, ever higher levels of reflection are reached reciprocally. Such strategies can be interpreted as moral rules.Artificial morality is related to the discipline of Artificial Life. As in artificial life, the use of genetic algorithms suggests itself. Rules of behaviour split and reunite as chromosome strings do. (shrink)