Using cluster analytical procedure, this study aimed (i) to determine whether people could be differentiated on the basis of coping profiles (or unique combinations of coping strategies); and (ii) to examine the relationships between these profiles and perceived stress and health-related behaviors. A sample of 578 French students (345 females, 233 males; M(age)= 21.78, SD(age)= 2.21) completed the Perceived Stress Scale-14 ( Bruchon-Schweitzer, 2002), the Brief COPE ( Muller and Spitz, 2003) and a series of items measuring health-related behaviors. A two-phased cluster analytic procedure (i.e. hierarchical and non-hierarchical-k-means) was employed to derive clusters of coping strategy profiles. The results yielded four distinctive coping profiles: High Copers, Adaptive Copers, Avoidant Copers and Low Copers. The results showed that clusters differed significantly in perceived stress and health-related behaviors. High Copers and Avoidant Copers displayed higher levels of perceived stress and engaged more in unhealthy behavior, compared with Adaptive Copers and Low Copers who reported lower levels of stress and engaged more in healthy behaviors. These findings suggested that individuals' relative reliance on some strategies and de-emphasis on others may be a more advantageous way of understanding the manner in which individuals cope with stress. Therefore, cluster analysis approach may provide an advantage over more traditional statistical techniques by identifying distinct coping profiles that might best benefit from interventions. Future research should consider coping profiles to provide a deeper understanding of the relationships between coping strategies and health outcomes and to identify risk groups.

https://hal-insep.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01579211/document

Coping profiles, perceived stress and health-related behaviors: a cluster analysis approach.

Gender, negative life events and coping on different stages of depression severity: A cross-sectional study among Chinese university students

Collective dance improvisation (e.g., traditional and social dancing, contact improvisation) is a participatory, relational and embodied art form which eschews standard concepts in aesthetics. We present our ongoing research into the mechanisms underlying the lived experience of "togetherness" associated with such practices. Togetherness in collective dance improvisation is kinaesthetic (based on movement and its perception), and so can be simultaneously addressed from the perspective of the performers and the spectators, and be measured. We utilise these multiple levels of description: the first-person, phenomenological level of personal experiences, the third-person description of brain and body activity, and the level of interpersonal dynamics. Here, we describe two of our protocols: a four-person mirror game and a 'rhythm battle' dance improvisation score. Using an interpersonal closeness measure after the practice, we correlate subjective sense of individual/group connectedness and observed levels of in-group temporal synchronization. We propose that kinaesthetic togetherness, or interpersonal resonance, is integral to the aesthetic pleasure of the participants and spectators, and that embodied feeling of togetherness might play a role more generally in aesthetic experience in the performing arts.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/8/2/23/pdf

Coordinated Interpersonal Behaviour in Collective Dance Improvisation: The Aesthetics of Kinaesthetic Togetherness

Teams are complex and dynamic entities that face constant changes to their team structures and must simultaneously work to meet and adapt to the varying situational demands of their environment (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006). Agencies, industries, and government institutions are currently placing greater attention to the influence on team dynamics and teamwork as they are important to key organizational outcomes. Due to increased emphasis being placed upon the understanding the maturation of team dynamics, the incorporation of efficient methodological tools to understand how teams are being measured over time becomes critical. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present a review of relevant academic articles detailing the science behind methodological tools and general approaches to study team dynamics over time. We provide an overview of the methodological tools used to understand team dynamics with accordance to specific temporal elements. Drawing from Kozlowski et al. (1999) process model of team development, we highlight relevant emergent team constructs within each stage. As well, for each stage, we discuss the what and how to measure team dynamics. Our analyses bring to light relevant, novel and complex approaches being used by researchers to examine specific constructs within different team developmental phases (e.g., agent-based simulations, computational modeling) and the importance of transitioning from a single source methodology approach. Implications and future research are also discussed.

/pdf/advancing-teams-research-what-when-and-how-to-measure-team-3ou7bbtgms.pdf

Advancing Teams Research: What, When, and How to Measure Team Dynamics Over Time.

Guided by concepts from a relational developmental perspective, this study examined intra- and interpersonal associations between self-esteem and depressive symptoms in a sample of 1,407 couples surveyed annually across 6 years in the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relations and Family Dynamics (pairfam) study. Autoregressive cross-lagged model results demonstrated that self-esteem predicted future depressive symptoms for male partners at all times, replicating the vulnerability model for men (low self-esteem is a risk factor for future depression). Additionally, a cross-partner association emerged between symptoms of depression: Higher depressive symptoms in one partner were associated with higher levels of depression in the other partner one year later. Finally, supportive dyadic coping, the support that partners reported providing to one another in times of stress, was tested as a potential interpersonal mediator of pathways between self-esteem and depression. Female partners' higher initial levels of self-esteem predicted male partners' subsequent reports of increased supportive dyadic coping, which, in turn, predicted higher self-esteem and fewer symptoms of depression among female partners in the future. Male partners' initially higher symptoms of depression predicted less frequent supportive dyadic coping subsequently reported by female partners, which was associated with increased feelings of depression in the future. Couple relations represent an important contextual factor that may be implicated in the developmental pathways connecting self-esteem and symptoms of depression. (PsycINFO Database Record

Pathways between self-esteem and depression in couples.

Relationships between cognitive coping, self-esteem, anxiety and depression: A cluster-analysis approach

Collective capability of producing patterned collective behaviors is one important field of research in work psychology (e.g., shared cognition approach, Fiore and Salas, 2004; interactive team cognition approach, Cooke et al., 2013), neurosciences (e.g., social neuromarkers, Tognoli et al., in press; neurological mirroring, Waldman et al., 2015), sociology (Miller, 2013), or human movement science (e.g., joint movement, Schmidt and Richardson, 2008; team behavior, Araujo and Bourbousson, 2016). Within this stream of research, one neglected topic has been to conceptualize how interactors regulate online their dynamic involvement in collective activity, which is the individual skillful activity of adjusting online to the needs of the collective behavior. Grounded in of the hypothesis that collective behavior emerges from a self-organized complex system, the present opinion discusses the nature of the active regulation of the interactions performed by the co-agents. A deeper grasp of this regulation process is needed to understand how and why interpersonal co-ordination forms, stabilizes and/or is destroyed, leading to the emergence of high order phenomena at the team scale that are not fully predictable from the individual activities that compose the social system under study.

Collective behavior is deemed here to constitute the property of a social system composed of living entities. In research that has considered collective behavior as emerging from a self-organized complex system, an important focus has been on the between-agents' interactions, supported by an informational flow that binds agents (e.g., Schmidt et al., 1990). In this stream of research, information is defined as an ambient energy that disturbs the agent, depending on his current activity (Varela et al., 1991). From the (interpersonal) informational flow, individual activities can be entrained, mutually affected by others' movements, so that the emerging collective behavior cannot be conceived out of either the nature or the content (i.e., being non-representational) of such a flow (e.g., Kelso, 1994; Lagarde and Kelso, 2006; Richardson et al., 2007). However, while between-agents informational flow has been considered the main binding mechanism that makes collective behavior emerge, we aim at pointing out that the way individuals manage their interaction in the real-time mainly has been theoretically presupposed rather than empirically investigated. We will use empirical and logical evidence to highlight shortcomings in the actual theorizations of the way individual movements merge into a collective unit. In our opinion, current research should restrict the importance of the co-regulation and the local couplings hypotheses. Both hypotheses appear unsatisfactory to us, and might probably be refined through a further consideration of the social system's size effects as a main topic.

/pdf/how-do-co-agents-actively-regulate-their-collective-behavior-3h4miuudw8.pdf

How do Co-agents Actively Regulate their Collective Behavior States?

Balance characteristics in patients with major depression after a two-month walking exercise program: a pilot study

Based on a diagnosis action research design, the present study assessed the fluctuations of the team experience of togetherness. Reported experiences of 12 basketball team members playing in the under-18 years old national championship were studied during a four-month training and competitive period. Time series analysis (Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average procedures) served to describe temporal properties of the way in which the fluctuations of task-cohesion and shared understanding were step-by-step experienced over time, respectively. Correlations, running-correlations and cross-lagged correlations were used to describe the temporal links that governed the relationships between both phenomena. The results indicated that the task-cohesion dimensions differed mainly for shared understanding dynamics in that their time fluctuations were not embedded in external events, and that the variations in shared understanding tend to precede ‘individual attractions to the task’ variations with seven ...

Marina Fortes-Bourbousson

Papers

Relationships between cognitive coping, self-esteem, anxiety and depression: A cluster-analysis approach

How do Co-agents Actively Regulate their Collective Behavior States?

Balance characteristics in patients with major depression after a two-month walking exercise program: a pilot study

Fluctuations of the experience of togetherness within the team over time: task-cohesion and shared understanding throughout a sporting regular season