Frank L. Gardner

A mindfulness-acceptance-commitment-based approach to athletic performance enhancement: Theoretical considerations

While traditional cognitive-behavioral skills-training-based approaches to athletic performance enhancement posit that negative thoughts and emotions must be controlled, eliminated, or replaced for athlete-clients to perform optimally, recent evidence suggests that efforts to control, eliminate, or suppress these internal states may actually have the opposite effect. Interventions based on mindfulness and acceptance suggest that internal cognitive and emotional states need not be eliminated, changed, or controlled in order to facilitate positive behavioral outcomes. Rather, it is suggested that an alternative or supplemental approach to the enhancement of athletic performance may be achieved through strategies and techniques that target the development of mindful (nonjudgmental) present-moment acceptance of internal experiences such as thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, along with a clarification of valued goals and enhanced attention to external cues, responses, and contingencies that are required for optimal athletic performance.

The Role of Experiential Avoidance in the Relationship Between Maladaptive Perfectionism and Worry

This study examined the role of experiential avoidance in the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and worry. The hypothesis was that experiential avoidance would mediate the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and worry. A total of 125 undergraduate participants completed measures assessing perfectionism, experiential avoidance, worry, depression, and social anxiety. A series of regression analyses showed that maladaptive perfectionism and experiential avoidance were significantly associated with worry and that experiential avoidance was a partial mediator in the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and worry. Partial correlations revealed significant relationships between experiential avoidance and worry and between one aspect of maladaptive perfectionism and worry independent of depression and social anxiety. Results suggest that experiential avoidance may be an important variable contributing to the occurrence of worry within the context of maladaptive perfectionism.

Understanding Clinical Anger and Violence: The Anger Avoidance Model

Although anger is a primary emotion and holds clear functional necessities, the presence of anger and its behavioral manifestations of aggression/violence can have serious emotional, health, and social consequences. Despite such consequences, the construct of clinical anger has to date suffered from few theoretical and treatment advancements and has received insufficient research attention. Thus, the purpose of this article is to introduce the Anger Avoidance Model, which is a new conceptualization of clinical anger and its behavioral manifestations. The Anger Avoidance Model suggests that among anger patients, a chronic early aversive history leads to information processing biases and emotion regulation deficits, which in turn result in intense efforts to avoid the experience of anger. This avoidance takes the form of hostile rumination (cognitive avoidance) and aggressive and violent behavior (behavioral avoidance). This model holds clear implications for research and treatment of this challenging clinical phenomenon.

The Psychology of Enhancing Human Performance

Part I: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations Chapter 1: Understanding Functional and Dysfunctional Human Performance: The Integrative Model of Human Performance (IMHP) Pre-Performance Phase Dispositional Characteristics Environmental Stimuli Performance Demands Performance Phase Post-performance Response Phase Behavioral Avoidance Cognitive Avoidance Introduction to the Acceptance-based Approach.

An Exploration of the Mediators Between Childhood Maltreatment and Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is associated with numerous long-term consequences and warrants significant clinical attention. Recent theoretical models and empirical research have suggested that several factors play a role in the development of IPV perpetration, including childhood maltreatment, early maladaptive schemas, anger, and difficulties in emotion regulation. This study investigated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and IPV, specifically examining the mediation of this relationship by several variables thought to be related to this pernicious problem, including early maladaptive schemas, the experience of anger, and emotion regulation difficulties. In a young adult collegiate sample of 110 women in relationships, results of a bootstrapped multiple mediation analysis supported the hypothesis that childhood maltreatment predicted physical aggression within intimate partner relationships and found that the total indirect effect of childhood maltreatment on physical aggression through the 3 proposed mediators was significant. However, consistent with recent empirical findings, only difficulties in emotion regulation significantly mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and physical aggression within the sample.