The lockdown resulting from coronavirus disease 2019 has had a huge impact on peoples’ health. In sport specifically, athletes have had to deal with frustration of their objectives and changes in their usual training routines. The challenging and disruptive situation could hold implications for their well-being. This study examined the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on changes in athletes’ reported eudaimonic well-being and goal motives over time. The relationship of resilience to changes in subjective vitality was also determined, and changes (...) in athletes’ goal motives were examined as potential mediators. Participants were 127 Spanish university athletes aged between 18 and 34 years. Approximately 4 months before the start of the lockdown in Spain, athletes responded to a questionnaire assessing their resilience, goal motives, and subjective vitality. Around 6 months later into the lockdown period, athletes’ goal motives and subjective vitality were assessed again. Growth modeling using hierarchical linear models revealed a significant decrease of autonomous goal motives and subjective vitality during the lockdown, but athletes did not show change over time in controlled goal motives. Path analysis, adjusting T2 measures for their corresponding T1 measures, showed that resilience significantly predicted changes in athletes’ autonomous goal motives, which then accounted for changes in subjective vitality. The indirect effect was significant. Resilience did not predict changes in athletes’ controlled goal motives. However, changes in controlled goal motives negatively predicted changes in subjective vitality during lockdown. The findings suggest negative impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown on athletes’ goal motives and eudaimonic well-being. Results also support the hypothesized mediational role of autonomous goal motives in the relationship between resilience and subjective vitality during the lockdown. As such, findings confirm the relevance of resilience to a key feature of athletes’ eudaimonic well-being and the importance of enhancing their autonomous goal striving. (shrink)

In the period since the 2008 Wall Street crash, little consensus has emerged on its causes or actions to prevent a recurrence. Our capability for rational decision making was overwhelmed. Viewing the entire financial system as a huge, richly interconnected organization suggests that its structure and associated management practices are suited for a far simpler environment. An organization that is large relative to its environment and sufficiently complex to require the coordination of specialized expertise cannot function by enabling decision makers (...) to respond only to local demands. The resulting inability to recognize critical interdependencies and the nature of their risk makes periodic catastrophic failure likely. Specifically, compartmentalization of information, influence, and reward creates a myopic decision environment in which individual decision makers are unlikely to make effective or ethical decisions. Useful criteria for evaluating solutions can be suggested by considering the interaction of two factors: limited human information processing capability and the effect of motivation on information processing. Taken together, they suggest that human information processing is both limited and opportunistic. We cannot process all information available and the information selected for processing narrows to that needed to achieve salient rewards. Because of this, the organization's reward practices and their effect on motivation are a critical variable. Large financial rewards contingent upon short term, local, simplistic measures inevitably narrow the focus of decision maker's attention to a small part of the system. In contrast, dominant intrinsic motivation is rooted in awareness of, and responsibility for, broader outcomes. Each type of motivation differs in its requirements for sharing of information, influence, and reward. These, in turn, determine the adaptability of the organization to complexity and change. While this has significant ethical implications, its logic rests on the limitations of human information processing and motivation. Aligning human motivation and information flow to the demands of a complex, turbulent financial environment is the challenge we must meet to prevent further cataclysms. (shrink)

This non-experimental, correlational study examined the relationships among self-actualization, well-being, and metacognition. Need-satisfaction and non-defensiveness were also tested as mediators in the relationship between metacognition and self-actualization. A battery of paper-and-pencil self-report measures was administered to a sample of undergraduate and graduate students in a public university in South Florida. Correlational and hierarchical regression analyses and structural equation modeling for mediational analysis were used to test the hypotheses. The results largely supported the hypotheses with only a few exceptions. Students who (...) demonstrated higher level of self-actualization experienced higher well-being as well. Moreover, need-satisfaction and non-defensiveness were found to be significantly and positively associated with self-actualization, providing preliminary supporting evidence for Maslow’s and Rogers’ theories of self-actualization. In addition, students with higher levels of general metacognitive competence were more likely to demonstrate higher level of need-satisfaction, non-defensiveness, self-actualization, and well-being. Further, metacognition and need-satisfaction, and metacognition and non-defensiveness shared common variance in predicting self-actualization. The relationship between metacognition and self-actualization was mediated by need-satisfaction and non-defensiveness, except for non-education students, for whom no mediational effect was detected by non-defensiveness. In sum, the findings imply that general metacognitive competence, which can be taught as a set of skills, theoretically contributes to students’ self-actualization and well-being. This study provides support for a conceptual model of self-actualization, which introduces this phenomenon as a goal-oriented process that is essential to students’ well-being and can be attained by exercising metacognition. The discussion of the findings highlights implications of this study for theory, research, and practice as a guide for scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the field of education and psychology. (shrink)

One in three university students experiences mental health problems during their study. A similar percentage leaves higher education without obtaining the degree for which they enrolled. Research suggests that both mental health problems and academic underperformance could be caused by students lacking control and purpose while they are adjusting to tertiary education. Currently, universities are not designed to cater to all the personal needs and mental health problems of large numbers of students at the start of their studies. Within the (...) literature aimed at preventing mental health problems among students (e.g., anxiety or depression), digital forms of therapy recently have been suggested as potentially scalable solutions to address these problems. Integrative psychological artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of a chatbot, for example, shows great potential as an evidence-based solution. At the same time, within the literature aimed at improving academic success, the online life-crafting intervention in which students write about values and passions, goals, and goal-attainment plans has shown to improve the academic performance and retention rates of students. Because the life-crafting intervention is delivered through the curriculum and doesn’t bear the stigma that is associated with therapy, it can reach larger populations of students. But life-crafting lacks the means for follow-up or the interactiveness that online AI-guided therapy can offer. In this paper, we propose to integrate the current literature on chatbot interventions aimed at the mental health of students with research about a life-crafting intervention that uses an inclusive curriculum-wide approach. When a chatbot asks students to prioritize both academic as well as social and health-related goals and provides personalized follow-up coaching, this can prevent -often interrelated- academic and mental health problems. Right on-time delivery, and personalized follow-up questions enhance the effects of both -originally separated- intervention types. Research on this new combination of interventions should use design principles that increase user-friendliness and monitor the technology acceptance of its participants. (shrink)