Training patterns and negative health outcomes in triathlon : longitudinal observations across a full competitive season

AIM: Despite heavy training requirements, triathlon is a sport that is rapidly increasing in popularity. Yet, there is limited research detailing the relationship between training, the incidence of injuries and illness, psychological stress, overtraining and athlete burnout amongst triathletes. Six hypotheses relating inter-individual differences to training factors were generated to evaluate change in self-reported measures of these negative health outcomes over a training year.

METHODS: Thirty, well-trained, triathletes (males n=20: age=27.1±9.1 years and females n=10: age=27.4±6.6 years) from a local triathlon club participated in this study. The study commenced during pre-season training, and involved weekly monitoring of each athlete until the end of the competitive season 45 weeks later. Linear Mixed Modelling was used for the analysis.

RESULTS: Signs and symptoms of injury and illness (SAS) were significantly associated with increases in training factors (P≤0.05); however, greatest impact on SAS was produced by psychological stressors (P≤0.001). Common symptoms of overtraining were significantly affected by increases in exposure to both training and psychological stressors (P≤0.05). Mood disturbance was not significantly affected by training factors (P>0.05) but rather increases in psychological stressors (P≤0.001). Finally, each of the three athlete burnout subscales were significantly affected by both psychological (P≤0.001) stressors as well as varying combinations of training factors (P≤0.05).

CONCLUSIONS: Exposure to stressors (either training or psychological) had significant effects on all negative health outcomes assessed.

Design of a valid simulation for researching physical, physiological and cognitive performance in volunteer firefighters during bushfire deployment.

Every year, Australian firefighters protect our nation from the devastation of bushfire. Understanding the impact of consecutive long shifts in hot, smoky conditions is essential for making decisions during campaign fires. At present, the evidence-base for such decisions is limited to laboratory studies with little relevance to bushfire suppression or field research where the impact of environmental and workload stressors cannot be measured. To counter these limitations, we have developed a three-day simulation that mimics the work and environment of campaign bushfire suppression. Construction of the simulation involved three stages; 1) data collection and analysis; 2) design and development; and 3) trial and refinement. The frequency, intensity, duration and type of physical work performed on the fireground is well documented and a modified applied cognitive task analysis, using experienced firefighters was used as a framework to describe in detail the non-physical aspects of the work. The design and development of the simulation incorporated the physical and non-physical aspects of the work into simulated tasks. Finally, experienced firefighters participated in trials of the simulation and reviewed digital recordings to ensure that the simulation accurately represented campaign bushfire suppression work. The outcome of this project is a valid, realistic, and reliable simulation of the physiological, physical and cognitive aspects of a volunteer firefighter on a three-day bushfire deployment.

Situated event bootstrapping and capture guidance for automated home movie authoring

This paper describes a novel interactive media authoring framework, MediaTE, that enables amateurs to create videos of higher narrative or aesthetic quality with a completely mobile lifecycle. A novel event bootstrapping dialog is used to derive shot suggestions that yield both targetted footage and annotation enabling an automatic Computational Media Aesthetics-aware editing phase, the manual performance of which is typically a barrier to the amateur. This facilitates a move away from requiring a prior-conception of the events or locale being filmed, in the form of a template, to at-capture bootstrapping of this information. Metadata gathered as part of the critical path of media creation also has implications for the longevity and reuse of captured media assets. Results of an evaluation performed on both the usability and delivered media aspects of the system are discussed, which highlight the tenability of the proposed framework and the quality of the produced media.

Attributes of champion female tennis players and challenges faced by aspirants

As part of a larger study on talent development in tennis1, 10 Australian top ranked Australian female professional tennis players responded to a questionnaire about the attributes of a champion recalling the major challenges faced in pursuing a tennis career and strategies adopted to address these challenges. To analyse the data, a series of three inductive content analyses were conducted. The results highlighted the importance of psychological attributes and skills in a player’s journey to become a champion. The study’s implications for coaches and sport psychologists are also highlighted.

Facial affect recognition and schizotypal personality characteristics

Aim: Deficits in facial affect recognition are well established in schizophrenia, yet relatively little research has examined facial affect recognition in hypothetically psychosis-prone or ‘schizotypal’ individuals. Those studies that have examined social cognition in psychosis-prone individuals have paid little attention to the association between facial emotion recognition and particular schizotypal personality features. The present study therefore sought to investigate relationships between facial emotion recognition and the different aspects of schizotypy.

Methods: Facial affect recognition accuracy was examined in 50 psychiatrically healthy individuals assessed for level of schizotypy using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. This instrument provides a multidimensional measure of schizophrenia proneness, encompassing ‘cognitive-perceptual’, ‘interpersonal’ and ‘disorganized’ features of schizotypy. It was hypothesized that the cognitive-perceptual and interpersonal aspects of schizotypy would be associated with difficulties identifying facial expressions of emotion during a forced-choice recognition task using a standardized series of colour photographs.

Results: As predicted, interpersonal aspects of schizotypy (particularly social anxiety) were associated with reduced accuracy on the facial affect recognition task, but there was no association between affect recognition accuracy and cognitive-perceptual features of schizotypy.

Conclusions: These results suggest that subtle deficits in facial affect recognition in otherwise psychiatrically healthy individuals may be related to the vulnerability for interpersonal communication difficulties, as seen in schizophrenia.