The relationship between self-presentation concerns and pre-game affect among adolescent American football players

Background： The influence of self-presentation concerns on the adolescent sport experience has received scant empirical attention. The purpose of this investigation was to prospectively examine the relationship among self-presentational concerns and pre-game affective states among middle and high school aged football players. Methods： American football players （n = 112; mean age = 15.57 years） completed a measure of self-presentational concerns （SPSQ, McGowan, et al., 2008） a week prior to the measurement of selected pre-game affective states （i.e., attentiveness, self-assurance, serenity, and fear）. Results： Regression analyses revealed that concerns about appearing athletically untalented negatively contributed to the significant prediction （p 〈 0.001） of pre-game attentiveness, /3 = -0.43, Radj ^2 19.5% （p 〈 0.001）, and self-assurance, /3 = -0.38, R^dj = 11.9% （p 〈 0.01）. Conclusion： These findings highlight the importance of reducing self-presentational concerns in promoting positive pre-game mental states that likely impact the quality of athletes＇ competitive play and experience. Copyright @ 2012, Shanghai University of Sport. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Male, Female, and Nonbinary Differences in UK Twitter Self-descriptions: A Fine-grained Systematic Exploration

Purpose: Although gender identities influence how people present themselves on social media, previous studies have tested pre-specified dimensions of difference, potentially overlooking other differences and ignoring nonbinary users.Design/methodology/approach: Word association thematic analysis was used to systematically check for fine-grained statistically significant gender differences in Twitter profile descriptions between 409,487 UK-based female, male, and nonbinary users in 2020. A series of statistical tests systematically identified 1,474 differences at the individual word level, and a follow up thematic analysis grouped these words into themes.Findings: The results reflect offline variations in interests and in jobs. They also show differences in personal disclosures, as reflected by words, with females mentioning qualifications, relationships, pets, and illnesses much more, nonbinaries discussing sexuality more, and males declaring political and sports affiliations more. Other themes were internally imbalanced, including personal appearance(e.g. male: beardy;female: redhead), selfevaluations(e.g. male: legend;nonbinary: witch;female: feisty), and gender identity(e.g. male: dude;nonbinary: enby;female: queen).Research limitations: The methods are affected by linguistic styles and probably underreport nonbinary differences.Practical implications: The gender differences found may inform gender theory, and aid social web communicators and marketers.Originality/value: The results show a much wider range of gender expression differences than previously acknowledged for any social media site.

Hidden Patterns behind Doping Use among Norwegians 18-19 Years Old

There is a growing public concern about the increasing use of performance enhancing drugs （doping） in sport, exercise and fitness activities. Research has been carried out to answer the question ＂Why do exercising young people use performance enhancing drugs？＂ The explanations of most quantitative researches are based on bivariate statistical analysis. But there are reasons to believe that one factor or motive is not suffice to explain such a complex and stigmatized behaviour. More probably, there may be clusters of psychological and societal, more or less hidden, reasons behind such behaviour. This study uses EFA （exploratory factor analysis） and combines sets of variables, in order to reveal hidden factors or patterns in the empirical data. Our study indicates that this kind of doping use should be interpreted within a social context where youths struggle with their lives, making sense of societal demands and expectations, using the ＂tools＂ they find fitting, and make their choices meaningful and functional. In other words, doping has something to do with muscles, self-presentation and meaning trying to build identities in a world where the body is the main symbol of value and morality.

Memes as Ideological Representations in the 2019 Nigerian Presidential Campaigns: A Multimodal Approach

This paper explicates the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of ideological representation in selected Nigerian political campaign advertisement memes on Instagram. Four memes pertaining to each of Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar’s presidential campaigns on Instagram were selected and analysed using a combination of Kress and van Leeuwen’s(2006) Social Semiotics and van Dijk’s(1998) Critical Discourse Analysis. Key ideological stances of positive self-presentation and negative otherpresentation were discovered in the memes and the aspirants largely deployed both stances. However, while aspirant Muhammadu Buhari maintained the positive selfpresentation strategy for continuity of government, aspirant Atiku Abubakar concentrated more on the negative other-presentation in order to undermine the incumbent candidate/party. All these were achieved with the reinforcement of social semiotic resources such as the meta-functions: facial and body gestures/expressions, and bright colours.