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TAKING A SHOT IN “TERROR”.
Periodical
By: BLUE, ALEXIS. USA Today Magazine. Jan2017, Vol. 145 Issue 2860, p66-67. 2p. , Database: Academic Search Complete
Athletic Arena ► HEAD INJURIES are a hot topic today in sports medicine, with numerous studies pointing to a high prevalence of sports-related concussions, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, among youth and professional athletes. Now a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-invented tool is aiding in detecting and diagnosing concussions in real-time. The American College of Sports Medicine estimates that, each year, roughly 300,000 high school and college athletes are diagnosed with sports-related head injuries—but that number may be several times higher due to undiagnosed cases. One-third of sports-related concussions among college athletes went undiagnosed in a study by the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consistently has referred to the rise of sports-related head injuries as a national epidemic. MIT alumnus Ben Harvatine, who suffered several head injuries as a longtime wrestler, has started selling the Jolt Sensor, which detects and gathers data on head impacts in realtime. Commercialized through Harvatine’s startup Jolt Athletics, the sensor now is being used nationwide by teams from grade-school to college levels, and is being trialed by professional teams. “We’re trying to give parents and coaches another tool to make sure they don’t miss big hits, or maybe catch a hit that doesn’t look that big but measures off the charts,” Harvatine says. The Jolt Sensor essentially is a small, clip- on accelerometer that can be mounted on an athlete’s helmet or other headgear to measure any impact an athlete sustains. When the athlete receives a heavy blow, the sensor vibrates
by Rob M atheson
“The American College of Sports Medicine estimates that, each year, roughly 300,000 high school and college athletes are diagnosed with sports-related head injuries—but that number may be several times higher due to undiagnosed cases.”
and sends alerts to a mobile app, which is monitored by coaches or parents on the sidelines. The app lists each player on a team wearing the sensor. Filtered to the top of the list are players that receive the biggest hits, players with the most total hits, and players with above-average hits compared to their past impacts. If a player sustains a hard hit, the player’s name turns red,
and an alert appears telling the coach to evaluate that player. The app includes a concussion symptom checklist and cognitive assessment test. “We can’t be overly diagnostic, but we do our best to communicate the urgency that that was a big hit and you need to check out the player,” Harvatine explains. By recording every impact, big or small,
TAKING A SHOT IN “TERROR” by A lexis Blue A pair of basketball studies gives credence to Terror Management Theory. It is not the locker room pep talk you would expect, but research from the University of Arizona suggests that athletes might perform better when reminded of something a bit grim: their impending death. In a pair of studies published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, basketball-playing participants scored more points after being presented with death-related prompts, either direct questions about their own mortality or a more subtle, visual reminder of death. Researchers indicate the improved performance is the result of a subconscious effort to boost self-esteem, which is a protective buffer against fear of death, according to psychology’s Terror Management Theory. ‘Terror Management Theory talks about striving for self-esteem and why we want to accomplish things in our lives and be successful,” says psychology doctoral student Uri Lifshin, co-lead investigator of the research. ‘‘Everybody has their own thing in which they invest that is their legacy and symbolic immortality.” The reason people do not live in constant fear of their inevitable death is because they have this system to help them deal with it, Lifshin explains. ‘Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem, which gives you a feeling that you’re part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you’re not just a sack of meat.” Participants in the studies were male college students who indicated that they enjoy playing basketball and care about their performance in the sport. None of them played for a formal college basketball team. “Our idea was that the study effect should only work for people who are motivated to perform well in sports. For individuals that derive less self-esteem from sport, whether they win or lose shouldn’t matter as much,” notes doctoral student Colin Zestcott, the other lead investigator. In the first study, 31 participants played a pair of one-on-one basketball games with Zestcott, who posed as another study participant. In between the two games, which lasted about seven minutes each, participants randomly were assigned questionnaires to complete. Some participants received packets that included prompts about death: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,” and, “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead.” Others were asked instead to think about playing basketball: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you,” and, “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball.” The questions were followed by several delay tasks to allow death thoughts to work outside of conscious attention. Researchers were blind to which prompts each player received. Those asked about death improved their personal performance in the second game by 40%,
66 USA TODAY * JANUARY 2017
the app also creates impact statistics for each athlete. “You can watch how athletes are trending— day to day, week to week, month to month—in terms of their total impact exposure and mitigate high-risk situations before they result in injury.” Several other concussion-monitoring sensors currently are available, but a key innova
tion of the Jolt Sensor, Harvatine indicates, is a custom communications protocol that allows an unlimited number of sensors to transfer data to the app from up to 200 yards away. “That gives us an unparalleled range. You don’t have to chase your kids around the field with your phone to get those alerts. You can actually follow a whole team at once.”
Apart from developing the sensors, the startup, headquartered in Boston, Mass., is focusing on gathering and analyzing data, which could provide deeper, objective insights into concussions. Over the years, Harvatine has seen sports- related head injuries become increasingly polarizing in the U.S., especially among parents. Some parents deny concussions happen so fre
w hile those asked about basketball saw no change in perform ance. Those who thought about death also performed 20% better as a whole in the second game than those in the other group. Before the questionnaires, the performance of both groups was roughly even. ‘W hen we’re threatened with death, we’re motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you’re out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem,’’ Lifshin maintains. The researchers’ second study looked at how participants performed in an individual basketshooting challenge when presented with a more subtle reminder of death. For the study, Lifshin wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a large white skull, made up of several iterations of the word “death.” Study participants were brought one at a time onto the court, where Lifshin gave each person a 30-second description of the challenge and rules. He wore the skull T-shirt in front of half of the participants. With the other half, he had his jacket zipped up to cover the shirt. A coin flip was used to determine randomly which participants saw the skull. Participants then completed a one-minute basket-shooting challenge, in which they could score
one point for a layup, two points from the free- throw line, and three points from the three-point line. To ensure that they kept moving, they were told they could not attempt the same type of shot back-to-back. They were scored by a different experimenter, who did not know who saw the shirt. Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30%. They also attempted more shots— an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt. ‘They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster,” Lifshin observed. Psychology professor Jeff Greenberg—one of the originators of Terror Management Theory and another coauthor of the studies, along with psychology doctoral student Peter Helm— indicates that the research provides important new support for the theory. “We’ve known from many studies that reminders of death arouse a need for terror management, and therefore increase self-esteem striving though performance on relatively simple laboratory tasks. However, these experiments are the first to show that activating this motivation can influence performance on complex, real-world behaviors.” While it may seem strange that something as dark as death could be motivating, coaches
have, in some ways, intuitively known this for years, the researchers point out. For example, a coach at halftime who says, “You win this and they’ll remember you forever,” plays into the human desire for immortality. Although the researchers looked specifically at basketball, they think the effects are not limited by sport. ‘T here’s no reason why it shouldn’t work in soccer as it does in basketball. We don’t believe this is sport-specific and we don’t believe this is gender-specific,” maintains Zestcott, a former student-athlete who played football as an undergraduate at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Zestcott and Lifshin hope future research might replicate their studies in collegiate or professional athletes and look at other sports, as well as possible effects on team performance. ‘This is a potentially untapped way to motivate athletes but also perhaps to motivate people in other realms,” concludes Zestcott. “Outside of sports, we think that this has implications for a range of different performance-related tasks, like people’s jobs, so we’re excited about the future of this research.”
A lexis Blue is assistant director of University Relations Communications at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
USA TODAY ★ JANUARY 2017 67
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