Psychological Skills Usage - Article Example

Running Head: Psychology Research Articles Psychology Your name Course name Instructor’s name Date of submission THE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT-ISSUED TERRO WARNINGS ON PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL RATINGS: VOLUME 10: September 30, 2004: 12 PAGES. ROBB WILLER. Introduction: After United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, all polls of the president Bush’s approval rating had an upward spike. I.e. those who approved Bush’s job performance short from 51% to 86% between 10th September 2001 Gallup polls and those released on September 15th. Though the sudden increase of polls regarding the president, there were no clear reasons of the spike. Moreover, Bush’s approval surpassed only that regarding the terror attack but all increased his popularity on how he handles the economy raising from 54% to 72% from July 11, 2011 and 5th October 2001 as reported by Gallup. According to Tajfel and Turner (1986) social identity theory, the fundamental cognitive tendency leads to individuals categorizing groups and other stimuli in terms of opposites. Individuals identify with specific groups to such extents that they see themselves as more similar to the members of the group than its salient out group. According to Trajfel (1970) threats of attacks strengthens the in group including its leadership by increasing the salience of a hated out-group in this case being the foreign terrorists. The author was out to test the claim that fear of terrorism leads to increased support for standing leaders and other related statuses. Finally, whether government issued warnings have a positive effect on the presidential approval ratings and the duration of the predicted effect. Method: The author collected data on government issued terror warnings and the presidential ratings during the time period extending from February 1, 2001 to may 9, 2004. Immediately after the US was attacked on September 11, 2001, some branches of the US government occasionally warned the public of the increased risk of terrorist attacks, and these warnings were followed by tight security. The data set begins prior to the attack on the US of September 11, 2001 and ends after the period of highest concentration of terror warnings. Then there was presidential approval variable and presidential economic approval level collected from the data gathered by Gallup organization which resulted from telephone interviews of approximately 1,000 adults conducted over 2-3 days periods. Gallup polls periods was between 0-19 days and therefore 131 polls of presidential approval were conducted during the study period. Presidential approval was reflected by the percentage of those who answered yes on the question “DO you approve or disapprove of the way George W Bush is handling his job as president?” The economic approval data was gathered intermittently in the same interviews. 44 Gallup polls of the economic approval for the president were conducted during the period of the study. The approval was reflected by those who answered yes in the question “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W Bush is handling the economy?” The author identified significant shocks to the president’s approval levels: the attacks on September 11, military action in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the beginning of war in Iraq march 20, 2003, the capture of Sadam Hussein on December 14, 2003 and the television broadcast of the Abu Ghraib prison whereby he specified a variable lasting for 4 weeks. As for the September 11th control variable, had more effects on presidential approval than other events. He also created two independent variables not confusing with the dependent variables. The independent lags are used to assess the duration of the effect of the independent variable, wile dependent variable lags are used to control for the past levels of the dependent variable. Results The author comes up with tables whereby the first table shows the results of four regression models with approval ratings as the dependent variables. He included two models to show the basic relationship between terror warnings and presidential approval. The models are the government issued warnings count before the polls and the two terrors lags terms. Model 1 shows that without controls, both terror warning count and the first lag term recorded an increased presidential approval. In model 2, he added control for five events which could have impact on Bush’s approval. Models 3 and 4 tested the effects of terror warning on presidential approval tests. Of all the four lags, terror warnings from the past week had significant and positive effect on the presidential approval levels, controlling for the most recent approval levels. In model 4, control variables like Afghanistan war, Iraq war were significantly related to presidential approval level. Terror warning count was significant predictor of president’s Bush approval level. On the duration of the effects of terror warning on presidential approval, models 1 and 2 suggested that the effect or terror warning persisted for more than a week but less than two weeks. However, in models 3 and 4, analysis the persistence of effects was less since they control the past levels, showing that the presidential approval levels are relatively short duration. Discussion From the data, there is a tendency of people to support standing leaders after threats of external terror and mostly to President Bush after the government issued terror warning. It also proved that terror warnings can effect evaluations of the president in areas that are irrelevant to terrorism like the way the economy is handled. Consequently, the polling intervals used by Gallup organization are somehow disquieting. Even if they stretched up to 19 days between some polling periods, others began a day after the last ended, this could have lead to over sampling of some periods in the data. There were small number cases for economic approval rating and therefore the author was not able to include many relevant statistical controls. There was a methodological limitation for the use of Gallup poll totals, rather than Gallup respondents’ actual responses. This gives a chance for future research to peruse this in order to produce conclusions with greater confidence. Finally the author suggests future research so as to integrate more opinion poll data from sources besides the Gullup organization. References Tajfel, Henri. 1970. "Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination." Scientific American 223:96-102. Tajfel, Henri. and John C. Turner. 1986. "The Social Identity Theory of Inter-Group Behavior." In Stephen Worchel and William G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago:Nelson-Hall. Psychological skills usage and the competitive anxiety response as a function of skill level in rugby union: Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 20 July 2006, Richard Neil, Stephen D. Mellalieu and Sheldon Hanton. Introduction The study was to check competitive anxiety symptoms and psychological skill usage in rugby union players with differing skill levels. It was used to find out whether competitive anxiety symptoms, self confidence, lower relaxation usage and greater imagery and self talk use affects the performance of the players in anyway. Method: The authors used 115 male rugby union performances, ranging from 18 to 36 years and they provided written informed consent. Elite participants were sampled from professional competition and non-elite players from provincial level competitions. The data was collected when all of them were in a competition or training for a competition. Test of performance strategies (TOPS) was used to measure the psychological skills used by athletes. It examined activation, relaxation, imagery, goal setting, self talk, automaticity, emotional control and attention control skills during practice and competition settings. A modified Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS) measured the intensity and direction of the trait component of worry and somatic anxiety. Competitive Trait Anxiety Inventorty-2 (CTAI-2) was used to measure confidence using a scale from Albrecht and Feltz’s (1987) responding to how each one felt. Data analysis was then divided into two stages. First the data was screened to investigate its accuracy. Then elite and non-elite groups were examined in relation to the participant’s scores on the modified SAS, CTAI-1 self confidence and TOPS subscales using multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) procedures Results: The elite group reported a less level of symptoms associated with worry (nonelite-7.17; elite-1.26; p Read More