The purpose of this study was to examine physical education (PE) teachers' strategies for identifying and motivating inactive students in PE to increase physical activity, both before and after participation in a professional development programme. A qualitative methodology was used, and semi-structured interviews were conducted. The study's theoretical framework, ontological relativism and epistemological constructionism, guided interpretation by participants' subjective experiences and how meanings were co-created. The project involved interviews with 15 randomly selected PE teachers (10 male, 5 female) from France, Greece, and Turkey. Data from semi-structured interviews were analysed using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis framework with an inductive-deductive coding approach performed independently by three researchers revealing four broad themes: (a) Strategies to identify/monitor students who do not participate in Physical Activity (PA), (b) Promoting student participation in out-of-school PA, (c) Implementing Goal Setting Theory (GST), (d) Promoting an autonomy-supportive or controlling climate in PE. The findings suggest that the project urged PE teachers to use monitoring and goal setting to identify students most in need of PA and to motivate them to participate in out-of-school PA. Despite the training, most PE teachers continued to use controlling behaviours and provided limited autonomy to students. However, some PE teachers reported that the IMPACT project challenged them to adopt an autonomous-supportive climate.

This work presents Interactive Conversational 3D Virtual Human (ICo3D), a method for generating an interactive, conversational, and photorealistic 3D human avatar. Based on multi-view captures of a subject, we create an animatable 3D face model and a dynamic 3D body model, both rendered by splatting Gaussian primitives. Once merged together, they represent a lifelike virtual human avatar suitable for real-time user interactions. We equip our avatar with an LLM for conversational ability. During conversation, the audio speech of the avatar is used as a driving signal to animate the face model, enabling precise synchronization. We describe improvements to our dynamic Gaussian models that enhance photorealism: SWinGS++ for body reconstruction and HeadGaS++ for face reconstruction, and provide as well a solution to merge the separate face and body models without artifacts. We also present a demo of the complete system, showcasing several use cases of real-time conversation with the 3D avatar. Our approach offers a fully integrated virtual avatar experience, supporting both oral and written form interactions in immersive environments. ICo3D is applicable to a wide range of fields, including gaming, virtual assistance, and personalized education, among others. Project page: https://ico3d.github.io/

We present Better Together, a method that simultaneously solves the human pose estimation problem while reconstructing a photorealistic 3D human avatar from multi-view videos. While prior art usually solves these problems separately, we argue that joint optimization of skeletal motion with a 3D renderable body model brings synergistic effects, i.e. yields more precise motion capture and improved visual quality of real-time rendering of avatars. To achieve this, we introduce a novel animatable avatar with 3D Gaussians rigged on a personalized mesh and propose to optimize the motion sequence with time-dependent MLPs that provide accurate and temporally consistent pose estimates. We first evaluate our method on highly challenging yoga poses and demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy on multi-view human pose estimation, reducing error by 35 keypoint-based methods. At the same time, our method significantly boosts the visual quality of animatable avatars (+2dB PSNR on novel view synthesis) on diverse challenging subjects.

Over the last years, 3D morphable models (3DMMs) have emerged as a state-of-the-art methodology for modeling and generating expressive 3D avatars. However, given their reliance on a strict topology, along with their linear nature, they struggle to represent complex full-head shapes. Following the advent of deep implicit functions, we propose imHead, a novel implicit 3DMM that not only models expressive 3D head avatars but also facilitates localized editing of the facial features. Previous methods directly divided the latent space into local components accompanied by an identity encoding to capture the global shape variations, leading to expensive latent sizes. In contrast, we retain a single compact identity space and introduce an intermediate region-specific latent representation to enable local edits. To train imHead, we curate a large-scale dataset of 4K distinct identities, making a step-towards large scale 3D head modeling. Under a series of experiments we demonstrate the expressive power of the proposed model to represent diverse identities and expressions outperforming previous approaches. Additionally, the proposed approach provides an interpretable solution for 3D face manipulation, allowing the user to make localized edits.

Climate change threatens human health, but its psychological effects on young people remains relatively understudied. Conversely, ample evidence demonstrates that Physical Activity (PA) positively impacts the psychological well-being in young people. Thus, this cross-sectional study investigated whether PA moderates the impact of a large flood experience on the relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being in young people. One thousand twenty-one (N = 1.021) adolescents aged 9 to 16 years old (Mage = 12.35 ± 1.38) completed measures for PA frequency, flood experience, eco-anxiety, and psychological well-being, six month after Daniel extreme flood event in Greece. Moderated moderation analysis was conducted to test the hypothesized model using PROCESS macro. We examined whether the relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being was moderated by flood experience alone, PA frequency alone, and/or flood experience and PA frequency combined. However the three-way interaction predicted only a very small of unique variance in well-being, ΔR2 = 0.007. Further examination of the three-way interaction showed that when PA frequency scores were lower than 2.71 days/week, flood experience potentiated the negative effect of eco-anxiety on well-being. In contrast, the moderating influence of flood experience on the relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being was buffered when PA frequency scores were higher than 6.25 days/week. Findings provide initial support that frequent PA participation (6-7 days /week) may improve the well-being of children and adolescents in times of crisis, potentially by reducing the effect of flood-related experience on the negative relationship between eco-anxiety and well-being.

A contemporary, theory-based conceptualisation of self-talk in sport (Latinjak, Hatzigeorgiadis, et al., [2019]. Speaking clearly & mldr; 10 years on: The case for an integrative perspective of self-talk in sport. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 8(4), 353-367. https://doi.org/10.1037/spy0000160) has distinguished between two main types of athletes' organic self-talk: spontaneous self-talk (an uncontrolled type of self-talk) and goal-directed self-talk (a controlled type of self-talk). However, these contemporary organic self-talk distinctions have not yet been operationalised to allow assessment suitable for quantitative research. The aim of this investigation was to develop and validate the Organic Self-Talk Questionnaire for Sport (OSTQS), a new theory-grounded, self-report measure, designed to assess the content and structure of athletes' organic, spontaneous and goal-directed self-talk at a state level during sport participation. Two studies were conducted. In Study 1, a prospective instrument was developed based upon the operational definitions of athletes' spontaneous and goal-directed self-talk in sport, and raw data collected from athletes in this study through open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. In Study 2, the psychometric properties of the developed questionnaire were tested through examination of factorial validity, discriminant validity, and reliability. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) revealed an adequate fit of a 17-item four-factor correlated model for spontaneous self-talk and a 28-item seven-factor correlated model for goal-directed self-talk; as well as the superiority of these models over their respective single-factor and hierarchical models. Furthermore, discriminant validity and reliability analyses of the subscale scores provided further evidence regarding the psychometric integrity of the instrument. Overall, the OSTQS seems a valid and reliable scale that could help us further enhance our understanding regarding athletes' organic self-talk, its antecedents, and its consequences.

Based on Self-Determination theory and social interaction models of social justice, in this article we examined whether perceptions of fairness catalysed the positive effects autonomy support on motivational and well-being outcomes. The study was conducted in the context of an all-boys school with 302 students, adopting a prospective design. Using surface analysis to estimate the dependent variables to be tested in non-liner regressions, the current research empirically extends social interaction models of distributive justice by testing, for the first time, whether perceptions of fairness can moderate the effects of autonomy supportive practices on satisfaction of psychological needs. The results demonstrated that perceptions of fairness engendered positive effects of favourable forms of autonomy support on satisfaction of the psychological need for competence. No analogous positive effects on other outcomes were found. Therefore, the perceptions of fairness constitute an important component of autonomy-supportive class climates that catalyse positive effects of favourable forms of autonomy support on satisfaction of the psychological need for competence. This evidence suggests that students are more likely to experience high levels of competence during physical education classes when they perceive that their favourable treatment is fair, though the effect does not generalise to autonomous motivation or subjective well-being.

Lower economic status (ES) is associated with a less adaptive experience of school and physical activity. However, empirical evidence supporting the detrimental association of lower ES on the affective and motivational experience in Physical Education (PE) remains scarce. Using a large sample (n = 10392) of adolescents from six countries (i.e., Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, England, Turkey), this cross-sectional study tested whether students’ ES was associated with the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs in PE, and in turn with motivational and affective outcomes in PE and their out-of-school physical activity intention. We further explored whether gender moderated the abovementioned relationship. Multigroup structural equation modelling showed that, in five of six countries (i.e., Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, England), a lower ES was associated with lower basic needs satisfaction (β = .10, p < .001), which in turn was associated with lower enjoyment (β = .75, p < .001), lower autonomous motivation (β = .83, p < .001), and weaker out-of-school physical activity intention (β = .36, p < .001), higher displeasure (β = -.51, p < .001), higher controlled motivation (β = -19, p < .001) and stronger amotivation in PE (β = -.28, p < .001). Exploratory analyses suggested that the relationship between lower ES and the less adaptative outcomes was amplified among girls. At the crossroad between psychology and sociology, this study provides new insights into how family lower ES and gender might interact to predict less adaptative motivational and affective experiences and outcomes in PE.

Students adopt a wide range of achievement goals in physical education (PE): performance or Self-Enhancing, mastery or SelfImprovement, and Self-Transcendence (ST; improve others ' competence). Yet, little is known about how perceptions of physical education teachers ' emphasis on ST achievement goals relate to students ' achievement goal adoption and social outcomes. Results from 516 students (262 boys and 254 girls) supported the construct validity of a measure assessing perceptions of teachers ' emphasis on ST, Self-Improvement, and Self-Enhancing goals. Perceptions of teachers ' emphasis on ST goals corresponded positively to ST goal adoption, positive affect, socially shared regulation, social ef fi cacy with peers, and inversely to negative affect. ST goal adoption fully mediated the effects of perceived teacher-initiated Self-Improvement and ST climate, on social ef fi cacy and socially shared regulation. Perceptions of teachers ' emphasis on ST had also direct effect on socially shared regulation. The results provide a new framework for understanding achievement goals structures triggering harmonic promotion of achievement and adaptive social outcomes in physical education and youth sport settings.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions to adolescents' routines manifested in increased sedentary behaviors, reduced physical activity (PA), diminished social contacts, and adverse effects on mental health. The study's objective was to analyze and compare adolescents' self-perceptions concerning health, vitality, and life satisfaction based on gender, PA, and education levels during the pandemic's restrictive timeframe before the January 2021 lockdown. A total of 1369 Portuguese students (621 boys and 748 girls; Mage: 14.4 years; SD: 1.74) participated in this study. Group differences were analyzed via ANCOVA, considering age, standardized BMI, socioeconomic status, and daily moderate-to-vigorous PA both pre- and during the pandemic. Only 3.1% of adolescents adhered to international PA guidelines. Results indicated generally low levels of adolescents' health self-perceptions, particularly among girls. The study sheds light on adolescents' self-perceptions of health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the associations between restrictive measures and adolescents' health perceptions and PA levels. Future studies are necessary to assess students' self-perceptions upon returning to normalcy and understand lingering negative effects on adolescents' well-being. Keywords: Adolescents; self-perceived health; vitality; life satisfaction; physical activity; COVID-19.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE:The use of deep learning to undertake shape analysis of the complexities of the human head holds great promise. However, there have traditionally been a number of barriers to accurate modelling, especially when operating on both a global and local level. METHODS:In this work, we will discuss the application of the Swap Disentangled Variational Autoencoder (SD-VAE) with relevance to Crouzon, Apert and Muenke syndromes. The model is trained on a dataset of 3D meshes of healthy and syndromic patients which was increased in size with a novel data augmentation technique based on spectral interpolation. Thanks to its semantically meaningful and disentangled latent representation, SD-VAE is used to analyse and generate head shapes while considering the influence of different anatomical sub-units. RESULTS:Although syndrome classification is performed on the entire mesh, it is also possible, for the first time, to analyse the influence of each region of the head on the syndromic phenotype. By manipulating specific parameters of the generative model, and producing procedure-specific new shapes, it is also possible to approximate the outcome of a range of craniofacial surgical procedures. CONCLUSION:This work opens new avenues to advance diagnosis, aids surgical planning and allows for the objective evaluation of surgical outcomes. Our code is available at github.com/simofoti/CraniofacialSD-VAE.

This paper introduces the Imperial Light-Stage Head (ILSH) dataset, a novel light-stage-captured human head dataset designed to support view synthesis academic challenges for human heads. The ILSH dataset is intended to facilitate diverse approaches, such as scene-specific or generic neural rendering, multiple-view geometry, 3D vision, and computer graphics, to further advance the development of photo-realistic human avatars. This paper details the setup of a light-stage specifically designed to capture high-resolution (4K) human head images and describes the process of addressing challenges (preprocessing, ethical issues) in collecting high-quality data. In addition to the data collection, we address the split of the dataset into train, validation, and test sets. Our goal is to design and support a fair view synthesis challenge task for this novel dataset, such that a similar level of performance can be maintained and expected when using the test set, as when using the validation set. The ILSH dataset consists of 52 subjects captured using 24 cameras with all 82 lighting sources turned on, resulting in a total of 1,248 close-up head images, border masks, and camera pose pairs.

This study examined whether the perceived motivational climate was associated with students' achievement goals and intrinsic motivation, from a multilevel (i.e., individual- and school-level) perspective within the Physical Education context. The sample was composed of 9855 students aged 10-18 (M-age = 13.96 years; SDage = 1.97 years) who belong to 237 different teachers from seven European countries. We used measures for teacher's motivational climate, achievement goals, and intrinsic motivation. After testing for cross-country invariance, results from the mediated structural equation model showed that partial mediation was the most suitable solution. Predictions from the accepted model supported theoretical predictions, suggesting a strong positive mediating role of task orientation between achievement goals and intrinsic motivation, while the role of ego orientation remained more ambiguous. Our findings also highlight the relevance of students' individual experiences in shaping their perception of the emphasised motivational climate, as well as reveal an additive effect in the prediction from task orientation to intrinsic motivation due to cluster belongingness. We discuss these results with other variables that might affect students' perceptions such as teacher-student relationship and motivational contagion and encourage future research to keep studying the construction of the students' perception of the teacher's emphasised motivational climate from a multilevel perspective.

About 80% of adolescents report insufficient physical activity (PA) worldwide. Beyond the association of attitudes, family and friends' support, and perceived behavioural control (PBC) with intention, self-regulation strategies are expected to underlie the association between intention and action. Particularly, action planning and self-monitoring, as well as the perceived energy needed to develop these strategies, may explain the relationship between intention and PA. However, existing evidence remains scarce and contrasted among adolescents. In a large sample of 13,136 adolescents from seven European countries, we examined the antecedents of intention. We further investigated whether action planning and self-monitoring mediated the association of intention with self-reported PA, as well as whether perceived energy predicted PA through these self-regulation strategies. Structural equation modeling showed that attitudes, PBC, family and friends' support were all associated with intention (b > 0.08, p < .001). Intention (direct effect, b = 0.23, p < .001) and PBC were associated with PA (b = 0.22, p < .001). Action planning (indirect effect, b = 0.06, p < .001) and self-monitoring (indirect effect, b = 0.10, p < .001) partly mediated the relationship of intention with PA. Perceived energy was associated with PA through the partial mediating effect of action planning (indirect effect, b = 0.05, p < .001) and self-monitoring (indirect effect, b = 0.11, p < .001). Our results suggest that both action planning and self-monitoring underlie the association between intention and PA among European adolescents and that perceived energy could be an antecedent of these self-regulation strategies.

The main aim of this study was to investigate the construct validity of a new MUltidimensional MOtivational Climate questionnaire in Physical Education (PE) at the Situational level of generality (MUMOC-PES), capturing four dimensions of empowering (autonomy support, task-involvement, relatedness support, structure) and three dimensions of disempowering (controlling, relatedness thwarting, ego-involvement) climate. Nine hundred and fifty-six adolescent students completed the new measure alongside measures of mastery and performance approach/avoidance climate and satisfaction. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the construct validity of the MUMOC-PES. Student satisfaction in PE corresponded positively to empowering and negatively to disempowering climate dimensions. Controlling for age, gender and within-class individual differences in perceived empowering and disempowering dimensions, class average scores on perceived empowering climate had significant effects on student satisfaction, implying predictive validity for the MUMOC-PES. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) suggested that perceived autonomy support and relatedness thwarting had direct positive and negative effects on satisfaction respectively. Moreover, effects of perceived structure and thwarting relationships on satisfaction were mediated through a mastery climate construct capturing the linkage between perception and mastery goal. The results are discussed in relation to existing measures and literature on motivational climate and the future use of MUMOC-PES in research and PE teachers' training.

The purpose of this study was to test the measurement invariance (across five languages, two time points, and two experimental conditions) of the empowering and disempowering motivational climate questionnaire-coach (EDMCQ-C; Appleton et al., 2016) when completed by 9256 young sport participants (M age = 11.53 years, SD = 1.39 years; 13.5% female). Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling was used to test the validity of a 2-factor (empowering and disempowering) model running a multiple group analysis without any equality constraint (configural invariance) followed by measurement invariance of factor loadings and thresholds (scalar invariance). Findings provided support for partial invariance across languages and scalar invariance across time and experimental groups. The factors were interpretable across the analyses, and items loaded as intended by theory except for item 15. This study provides further evidence regarding the psychometric properties of the EDMCQ-C and suggests this scale (minus item 15) can be used to provide meaningful latent mean comparisons (Marsh et al., 2013) of empowering and disempowering coach-created climates across athletes speaking the five targeted languages, across time, and across experimental groups.

Multicultural societies require educators' intercultural competence. This trial examined if attitudes and perceived competences of pre-service Physical Education (PE) teachers could be improved by an online, teacher education course structured upon the findings of the intercultural education through physical activity, coaching, and training (EDU:PACT) project. Following individual preferences, participants (N = 129) were allocated to this course or control condition of the usual University curriculum. The intervention vs. control group scored better in outcomes of skills, knowledge, and one attitude dimension post-intervention. This teacher education course may effectively train pre-service PE teachers on intercultural education. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Current guidelines support that physical activity during the perinatal period is beneficial for the mother and the foetus. However, women during their pregnancy and postpartum limit or discontinue their exercise routine. The aim of this study was to illustrate perinatal women's views and experiences derived from an Exercise Counselling (EC) intervention and evaluate the intervention's acceptability. A qualitative study with semi-structured interviews was conducted with eight adult women of reproductive age recruited from obstetric care practices. Participants had just completed an EC intervention regarding the effectiveness of exercise on perinatal depressive symptoms, implemented in the context of a Randomised Control Trial. The analysis resulted in three overarching themes: main obstacles to engagement with the EC intervention, factors that enabled participation in the EC intervention and participants' suggestions to improve the EC intervention. One of the main obstacles to engagement with the EC intervention was socio-cultural factors, such as the post-birth forty-day home stay, which negatively impacted women's participation in the intervention. By contrast, obstetricians' support and the positive effect of exercise on mental well-being were enabling factors. Finally, among recommendations to improve the EC intervention, women cited the partner's involvement and engagement in the EC earlier in pregnancy. In conclusion, designing and implementing culturally sensitive interventions targeting expectant parents as a dyad is fundamental for researchers and obstetricians. Future research should focus on identifying effective strategies to educate obstetricians about perinatal exercise and to develop protocols that could support the implementation of perinatal exercise counselling sessions in public health policy.

Video modeling is a type of observational learning that can influence students' motor skill development. The present study was designed to investigate the influence of video modeling on students' self-regulation in physical education classes. Two classes of 45 students (24 boys and 21 girls) aged 8 years were randomly assigned into two groups: the class that observed a video of an expert model performing the kick was the video modeling group; and the class that observed their teacher's performance was the live modeling group. Students were taught football skills, twice a week for four weeks. Before and after the intervention, students had to perform a kick in a soccer box. The use of self-regulation strategies during the tests was assessed through structured interview questions after performances. The statistical analysis showed that both groups developed their self-regulation abilities. The results of this study suggest that video modeling improves self-regulation in children and should be used by practitioners.