There has been very limited research on the use of self-worth protection strategies in the achievement context of school physical education (PE). Thus, this study aimed to examine some antecedents and consequences of defensive pessimism and selfhandicapping. The sample comprised 534 (females n = 275; males n = 259) British pupils recruited from two schools who responded to established questionn...

A former study with scenarios conducted in Hawaii has suggested that humans share with non-human mammals the same basic defensive strategies - risk assessment, freezing, defensive threat, defensive attack, and flight. The selection of the most adaptive strategy is strongly influenced by features of the threat stimulus - magnitude, escapability, distance, ambiguity, and availability of a hiding ...

RISK is a popular board game invented by Albert Lamorisse and released in 1957. The board depicts a stylized political world map divided into territories, each occupied by one or more of a player’s army units, which we will refer to simply as armies. The bulk of play consists of a turn-based series of attacks between player armies occupying adjacent territories in an effort to occupy the entire...

Two studies examined motivational influences on and correlates of defensive pessimism and self-handicapping and investigated the relationship between these two cognitive strategies and performance attainment. The findings indicated that defensive pessimism and self-handicapping have similar motivational profiles, with the primary difference being that self-handicapping represents the absence of...

Plants have evolved a variety of defensive strategies to resist herbivory, but at the interspecific level, the relative effectiveness of these strategies has been poorly evaluated. In this study, we compared the level of herbivory between species that depend on ants as indirect defenders and species that rely primarily on their own direct defenses. Using a dataset of 871 species and 1,405 data ...

Phishing attacks attempt to fraudulently solicit sensitive information from a user by masquerading as a known trustworthy agent. They commonly use spoofed emails in association with fake websites in order to coerce a user into revealing personal financial data. Phishing is now a serious problem with criminals adopting the well-developed and well-known techniques to exploit Internet users with s...

various and complex human activities in geographical contexts need proper ground if at most efficiency is to be achieved. land preparation regulates the relationship between human, space, and human activities. land preparation has various dimensions related to value system, political, scientific, artistic, and defense-security aspects. one of the most important dimensions of land preparation is...

Previous work (Knee & Zuckerman, 1996) found that the combination of high autonomy and low control was associated with fewer self-enhancing attributions after success and fewer self-protective attributions after failure. The present research again found strong support for a synergistic effect of causality orientations on defensive behavior through a prospective examination of defensive coping s...

During debates and interviews, political leaders often have to defend themselves from adversaries and journalists questioning their performance. To fight against these threats, politicians resort to various defensive strategies, either direct or indirect, to draw attention away from their responsibilities or shed a more positive light upon their work. Counterfactual defences (i.e., comparing pa...