Media releases

• Adolescents sought for Brock study on personality and social connection during pandemic

  Thursday, July 22, 2021 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 22 July 2021 – R0081

  A team of Brock researchers wants to learn more about perfectionism and well-being among adolescents, while also exploring the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on school experiences.

  Anyone between the ages of 12 and 18 is invited to participate in the Niagara Adolescent Personality and Social Connection Study, conducted by researchers in Brock’s Developmental Processing in Health and Well-being Lab in the Department of Child and Youth Studies.

  Over the course of four months, participants will complete a series of three online surveys covering a variety of topics including personality, emotions, school experiences and feelings about the COVID-19 pandemic.

  A few participants will also be randomly selected to complete an online interview in addition to the surveys. For each survey completed, participants will receive a $20 Amazon gift card. Those who complete an online interview will also receive a $25 Amazon gift card.

  Associate Professor Danielle Sirianni Molnar says the study has grown out of results from previous research on adolescent youth relationships, social connection and personality that began prior to the global pandemic.

  “The previous study didn’t have rich information on the actual COVID-19 experience because it was designed pre-pandemic, and it also didn’t go in depth on educational issues,” says Molnar. “Based on what we’ve learned from our previous research, we’ve added a lot more on these topics to this new study to get a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of what’s going on with youth during COVID-19.”

  Professor Dawn Zinga says that although the last study didn’t explicitly ask about mental health, the issue emerged as a strong theme for youth. And because the study continued through key time frames in Ontario’s pandemic restrictions, the team can glean data about youth mental health.

  Zinga and Molnar, along with Sabrina Thai in the Department of Psychology, research associate Tabitha Methot-Jones and master’s student and lab assistant Melissa Blackburn, are now working on a paper based on those results showing how pre-pandemic perfectionism, anxiety and depression changed across the first government lockdown in Ontario and the second.

  “From pre-pandemic to first lockdown, depression actually decreased slightly, but then we saw a steep increase from first lockdown to second lockdown, with changes in perfectionism paralleling the changes in depression,” says Molnar. “Higher levels of socially prescribed perfectionism, which is when you perceive others expecting perfection from you, were associated with greater depression over time.”

  Molnar says this is strong evidence of the links between perfectionism and mental health in adolescents, which has already been shown in older populations.

  “Research is clearly suggesting that youth who are higher in perfectionism are vulnerable to the negative aspects of the pandemic, so we really want to explore how and why,” Molnar says. “The goal is to come up with evidence-based strategies to help these youth, as well as parents and educators, to recognize what’s happening and provide some help.”

  This is all the more significant because other research from the lab shows that nearly half of all youth in multiple studies — 47.8 per cent — self-identified as being perfectionists.

  Zinga says part of a perfectionistic personality is making an effort to seem like the perfect child. She warns that caregivers and teachers need to be vigilant about seeing what is happening, rather than how a young person presents.

  “In our earlier work, participants talked about feeling isolated and actively withdrawing from connections, even within the same household — not connecting with their parents, not telling them things,” says Zinga. “Parents need to watch the behavioural signals underneath, like eating or spending too much time in their room. In the pandemic, you may be sharing more space and time with your children, but your attention may actually be more divided, so it’s important to rely on more than proximity as you assess your child’s well-being.”

  Blackburn says the research team is hoping to recruit up to 500 Ontario youth to participate in the mixed-methods Niagara Adolescent Personality and Social Connection Study, which will form the foundation of her master’s thesis research.

  Anyone between the ages of 12 and 18 who would like to participate needs to have a private email address. Those under the age of 18 also need their parents’ permission to participate, which can be granted via email. Requests to participate and parental permission can be sent to [email protected]

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  * Dan Dakin, Manager Communications and Media Relations, Brock University [email protected] or 905-347-1970

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  Categories: Media releases

• Brock experts weigh in on Tokyo Olympic Games

  Wednesday, July 21, 2021 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 21 July 2021 – R0080

  After a year-long postponement due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will officially kick off Friday, July 23 with the opening ceremony.

  Like many things over the past year and a half, these games will be unprecedented in nature.

  While spectators have been banned from all Olympic venues, Olympic Village will be far from empty, with about 11,500 athletes expected to compete in Japan. Another estimated 79,000 journalists, officials and staff are also expected to be in attendance.

  Among the competitors, Team Canada is sending 371 athletes to the Tokyo Olympics, the country’s largest Olympic contingent since the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games.

  Brock University has numerous experts available to speak with the media in the lead-up to and during the Olympic and Paralympic Games on a variety of subjects:

  Sport psychology

  “With respect to sport psychology and performing under pressure, this is going to be a very different type of Olympics,” says Brock University Department of Kinesiology Chair and Professor Philip Sullivan. “The athlete’s cycle has already been set off a year, and now, with no audiences and the possibility of testing positive for COVID-19 in the back of everyone’s minds, these athletes are having to deal with stressors we’ve never seen before.”

  In terms of the mental toughness, high-performance athletes are used to “staying in the zone,” while competing under difficult conditions and planning ahead for stressors such as adjusting to different time zones, different food and sleep patterns, he says.

  “In Tokyo, we may see very different types of performance because of the ‘what ifs’ and lack of spectators,” Sullivan says. “For example, if you are a swimmer, you are used to tuning out spectator noise to some extent, but it’s often a part of the training environment, and so familiar. The idea of not having spectators is all new.”

  Testing for COVID-19 is another unknown to contend with along with the potential timing of those results.

  “What happens to the athlete who is leading a competition and halfway through a COVID-19 test comes back positive and they are removed?” says Sullivan. “Or what’s going to happen, when it’s 30 minutes before a wrestling match and you’re told you can’t compete? How do you mentally prepare for that?”

  Branding and sponsorship issues

  Also watching these games carefully is Assistant Professor of Sport Management Michael Naraine, who is interested in learning which brands will withdraw their advertising from the Games.

  He points out that each Olympic Games have top-level sponsors, such as this year’s contingent including Toyota, Samsung and Panasonic. But Toyota, which joined the Olympic Partner programme in 2015 as the first-ever mobility partner, announced this week it was cancelling television advertisements and its CEO won’t attend opening ceremony as a result of the deep unpopularity of the Tokyo Olympics in the host country of Japan, where residents fear that staging the Games will further fuel a rise in Delta variant COVID-19 infections.

  “The Toyota Olympic Worldwide Paralympic partnership was supposed to be a type of coming out party for the brand as they debuted vehicles, mobility support robots and mobility services,” Naraine says. “Toyota actively distancing themselves from the Games early is an attempt to help its brand with the Japanese people. It will be interesting to see if others do the same.”

  Naraine expects many of the brands associated with the Olympics are currently assessing whether they will see a return on their investment or deem the Games too high risk to continue supporting.

  Gender equity

  The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is saying Tokyo 2020 will be the most gender equal Games ever. The IOC has introduced a number of relatively superficial and performative changes, such as encouraging each country to select both a male and female flag bearer. More substantially, each nation has been encouraged to send at least one male and one female athlete as part of its delegation.

  Sport Management Assistant Professor Michele Donnelly says more needs to be done.

  “While these are positive moves toward gender equality, they ignore really significant inequalities in many of the events on the Olympic programme including uniforms, rules, equipment, race distances and more,” Donnelly says. “These differences in the conditions of men’s and women’s participation need attention in order to claim that the Olympic Games are truly gender equal.”

  Environmental issues

  Heat will be the biggest environmental challenge to athlete performance and health at these Games, says Department of Kinesiology Professor Stephen Cheung, an expert in environmental physiology.

  Heat can drastically decrease performance capacity in both elite and recreational athletes across all outdoor sports.

  “Canadian athletes and sport scientists have been at the forefront of applied research and techniques to reduce heat impact and optimize performance over the past several decades of international competitions,” he says.

  Cheung is available to speak about what happens to athletes when their bodies get too hot; how much hydration is really needed during physical activity in the heat; strategies for adapting to the heat; and how to stay cool in high temperatures.

  Socio-economic impacts

  Associate Professor of Sport Management and Director of Brock’s Centre for Sport Capacity Julie Stevens studies how people perceive the economic, social and environmental impact of sporting events and what the key considerations are when bidding for and hosting these events.

  “Prior to the pandemic, projections indicated global sport tourism would experience double-digit growth and this would be driven by an increasing number of sport events,” Stevens says. “The appeal of the Olympics is its high profile and media exposure that capture international attention and improve public image of the host city. Given Tokyo Games authorities have closed the sport venues to spectators and no international tourists are allowed to enter the country, benefits such as economic and social impacts remain uncertain.”

  She says economic impact studies of these large-scale sport events typically demonstrate the rise in economic activity, but this is mainly based upon visitor spending.

  “With Tokyo and many other venue locations under lockdown regulations, organizers will need to expand how they assess the impact of the Games. The perceptions of residents will matter,” she says.

  Media impact

  Also available to speak with the media is Assistant Professor of Sport Management Olan Scott, whose research focuses on how media communications shape and reflect issues of national identity, gender and race in the context of globally significant sporting events.

  He’ll be watching how broadcasters frame Olympic coverage from a nationalistic and gendered perspective.

  “My research has identified nationalistic bias in a variety of Olympic and Commonwealth Games and how male and female athletes were portrayed by announcers,” says Scott.

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

  * Dan Dakin, Manager Communications and Media Relations, Brock University [email protected] or 905-347-1970

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  Categories: Media releases