Introduction: Athlete burnout has many potential negative effects on athletes’ sporting performance and careers. Maintaining and promoting the coach–athlete relationship to meet athletes’ basic psychological needs is one way to reduce burnout. Existing studies of the correlation between coach-athlete relationships and athlete burnout have mainly focused on the coaches’ leadership style, with little attention given to relationship-maintenance strategies and the mechanism of athlete burnout from the athletes’ perspective.Methods: Using an online survey of 256 adolescent athletes, we explore the relationship between relationship-maintenance strategies and athlete burnout, including the potential mediating effects of the coach–athlete relationship and basic psychological needs satisfaction.Results: (1) Athletes’ relationship-maintenance strategies negatively predicted athlete burnout. (2) Besides the direct effect, we found evidence to support three mediation paths: (a) the coach–athlete relationship, (b) basic psychological needs satisfaction, and (c) both as serial mediators.Discussion: These findings enhance understanding of the mechanism of athlete burnout, demonstrating the influence of factors beyond the coach’s role. The study also provides a theoretical basis for practical intervention by coaches, athletes, and sports organizations to reduce athlete burnout by focusing on athletes’ perspectives.

Due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and consequent confinement measures, young people are vulnerable to mental health problems. The current study compared a group of 440 young adolescents (10–12 years) and a group of 330 emerging adults (18–25 years) to investigate the extent to which perceived social support and psychological capital (PsyCap) were differentially associated with mental health problems. Participants were asked to report their current psychosocial adaptation status during the COVID-19 pandemic, and data were collected via online questionnaires during a relatively severe period of COVID-19 in China. Results of the multi-group path analysis indicated that the effect of perceived social support on mental health problems was mediated by PsyCap for young adolescents, but not for emerging adults. These results were discussed with respect to the mechanism of how social support and PsyCap serve as protective mental health factors for youth in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Early life stress (ELS) can be very harmful to an individual’s wellbeing and brain development. It is well established that childhood maltreatment is a significant risk factor for depression. ELS is positively correlated with depressive symptoms both in major depression disorder patients and healthy individuals, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this association are still unclear. In the present study, we calculate the within/between-network connectivity in 528 college students, and Pearson correlation was performed to investigate the relationship between network measures and ELS. Additionally, the same method was applied to verify these results in another sample. Finally, mediation analysis was performed to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms regarding the association between ELS and depression. Correlation analysis indicated that ELS was positively correlated with the within-network connectivity of the ventral attention network (VAN), the dorsal attention network (DAN), the salience network (SN), the somatosensory network (SMN) and the between-network connectivity of ventral attention network-dorsal attention network (VAN-DAN), ventral attention network- somatosensory network (VAN-SMN), and ventral attention network-visual network (VAN-VN). Validation results indicated that ELS is associated with the within-network connectivity of VAN and DAN. Mediation analysis revealed that attention bias and the within-network connectivity of VAN could mediated the relationship between ELS and depression. Both behavioral and neural evidence emphasize ELS’s influence on individual’s emotion attention. Furthermore, the present study also provides two possible mediation models to explain the potential mechanisms behind the relationship between ELS and depression.

Individuals with high trait anxiety form a non-clinical group with a predisposition for an anxiety-related bias in emotional and cognitive processing that is considered by some to be a prerequisite for psychiatric disorders. Anxious individuals tend to experience more worry under uncertainty and processing uncertain information is an important, but often overlooked factor in anxiety. So, we decided to explore the brain correlates of processing uncertain information in individuals with high trait anxiety using the learn-test paradigm. Behaviorally, the percentages on memory test and the likelihood ratios of identifying novel stimuli under uncertainty were similar to the certain fear condition, but different from the certain neutral condition. The brain results showed that the visual cortex, bilateral fusiform gyrus and right parahippocampal gyrus were active during the processing of uncertain cues. Moreover, we found that trait anxiety was positively correlated with the BOLD signal of the right parahippocampal gyrus during the processing of uncertain cues. No significant results were found in the amygdala during uncertain cue processing. These results suggest that memory retrieval is associated with uncertain cue processing, which is underpinned by over-activation of the right parahippocampal gyrus, in individuals with high trait anxiety.

In this paper, we attempt to predict and explain psychological maladjustment or difficulty. Specifically, we discuss the concept of perceived chronic social adversity, and we expect that such perceived chronic social adversity may potentially lead to chronic stress responses. Accordingly, we propose the symptomatic reactions of perceived chronic social adversity. We put forward a set of hypotheses regarding the relationships between perceived chronic social adversity and those chronic stress responses, and we further hypothesize a mediating role of individualized negative essentialism brought by perceived chronical social adversity. Resilience and individual differences in the ability to cope with perceived adversity are discussed. Future research and prevention need to pay more attention to effects of subjective personal experiences on psychological difficulty, focusing on the importance of exploring daily social experiences in improving cognitive construction processes and developing appropriate preventions.

The goal of this study was to develop a measure that assesses negative daily social encounters. Specifically, we examined the concept of perceived chronic social adversity and its assessment, the Perceived Chronic Social Adversity Questionnaire (PCSAQ). The PCSAQ focused on the subjective processing of daily social experiences. Psychometric properties were examined within two non-clinical samples (N = 331 and N = 390) and one clinical sample (N = 86). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a three-factor model of the PCSAQ, which corresponds to three types of daily social stressors. The final 28-item PCSAQ was shown to be internally consistent, and to have good construct validity in terms of factor structure and group differences. It was also shown to have good concurrent validity in terms of association with outcome variables (sense of control, happiness, and mood and anxiety symptoms). Perceived chronic social adversity was also shown to be correlated with PTSD severity. Taken together, these findings suggest that the PCSAQ is a reliable, valid, and useful measure that can be used to assess negative social and clinical aspects of personal experiences. This study is an important exploratory step in improving our understanding of the relationship between the cumulative effect of negative social encounters and psychological difficulty.