In a review on bright-light therapy (BLT) for the treatment of mood disorders, Pail and colleagues (2011) stated that BLT is established as the treatment of choice for SAD/winter type. In the last 2 decades, the use of BLT has expanded beyond SAD: there is preliminary evidence for its effectiveness in chronic depression, antepartum depression, pre-menstrual depression, bipolar depression and disturbances of the sleep-wake cycle. However, the authors noted that data on the usefulness of BLT in non-seasonal depression are promising; further systematic studies are still needed.
Heavy training in combination with inadequate recovery actions can result in the overtraining/staleness syndrome and burnout. Even young and aspiring elite athletes develop staleness. The aim was therefore to determine the incidence and nature of staleness, and its association with training behavior and psychosocial stressors in young elite athletes. A sample of 272 individuals from 16 sports completed questionnaires on training, staleness, and psychosocial stress and 37 % reported being stale at least once. The incidence rate was higher for individual sports (48 %) compared with team (30 %) and less physically demanding sports (18 %). Stale athletes reported greater perceptual changes and negatively elevated mood scores in comparison to healthy athletes. Staleness was distinguished from burnout on the basis of motivational consequences; 41 % of the athletes lost their motivation for training, which in turn indicates a state of burnout. Further, 35 % of the athletes reported low satisfaction with time spent on important relationships, 29 % rated the relationship with their coach as ranging from very, very bad to only moderately good. The results indicate that staleness is a widespread problem among young athletes in a variety of sports, and is not solely related to physical training, but also to non-training stressors.
2011 Mood Pictures Stockholm Syndrome
In addition, we also wanted to confirm that the differences in clothing of the female targets (underwear vs. sweater) could significantly shift the perceived sexual objectification of the female targets. Therefore, the target in each picture was judged on the extent to which she was objectified. In line with previous research (Loughnan et al., 2010; Vaes et al., 2011; Vaes et al., 2019), we expected the scarcely dressed female targets to be objectified significantly more than the fully dressed targets. Furthermore, we investigated some of the social judgments that have shown to be central in the literature on sexual objectification or to be correlated with this phenomenon (i.e., attractiveness, sexiness, competence, likeability, and trustworthiness). First of all, we wanted to control the level of attractiveness attributed to each model in each picture. Given that all the pictures depicted highly attractive and professional models, we did not expect any significant differences regarding the evaluation of attractiveness for objectified and non-objectified targets. The level of sexiness has shown to be correlated with the level of objectification of the female targets in past research (e.g., Fasoli et al., 2018; Vaes et al., 2011). In line with this finding, we expected objectified female targets to be perceived and evaluated as sexier than their non-objectified counterparts. On the basis of the results of Heflick et al. (2011), we wanted to show that the objectified models are perceived to be less competent and trustworthy. Finally, we also measured the likeability of each target. In the literature, contrasting results have emerged about the perceived likeability of objectified and non-objectified female targets. While Heflick et al. (2011) suggested that objectified women were seen as less warm and likeable than their non-objectified counterparts, Gray et al. (2011), instead, demonstrated that objectified female targets were evaluated as warmer and likeable than those who were not objectified. For this reason, we did not have any a priori hypothesis about the perceived likeability of the objectified and non-objectified female targets.
Lastly, the presence of low-intensity pictures in the current database might be used to create dynamic stimuli through the use of morphing techniques. Such dynamic stimuli might allow researchers to test the impact of sexual objectification in more complex interactive context (Gervais et al., 2019). Moreover, ambiguous stimuli could be suitable to investigate how contextual factors and individual differences influence emotion recognition processes (Wieser & Brosch, 2012). Indeed, the categorization of facial expressions is strictly modulated by external contextual cues (Aviezer et al., 2011), and this is particularly true for ambiguous or non-emotional faces (e.g., Bublatzky et al., 2020; Russell & Fehr, 1987). Indeed, there is evidence that psychological disorders (e.g., social anxiety disorders, Maoz et al., 2016; eating disorders, Fujiwara et al., 2017), as well as implicit prejudice (Hutchings & Haddock, 2008) may bias the perception of ambiguous emotional faces. Therefore, the low-intensity emotion pictures in the current database could be used to investigate whether contextual aspects and stereotypes influence the processing of facial expressions within the phenomenon of sexual objectification.
Indeed, we did not include male pictures in the database. In different past studies, the main manipulation consisted in comparing the sexual objectification toward female and male targets. However, given that it has been widely demonstrated how women are the main victims of this phenomenon (Heflick et al., 2011; Vaes et al., 2019, 2020), we decided to include pictures of women only. In this way, sexual objectification can be manipulated comparing scarcely and fully dressed female targets. In addition, emotion recognition research typically keeps the gender of the targets constant to avoid gender effects. Nonetheless, future research could consider validating a database of sexualized and non-sexualized male models to allow comparisons between gender.
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