Eric Brymer - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Eric Brymer
Centre for Health Research; Faculty of Health; Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation; School of Exercise & Nutrition Sciences, Mar 10, 2010
... Table of Contents Part 1 1. The Constraints-based Approach to Motor Learning: Implic... more ... Table of Contents Part 1 1. The Constraints-based Approach to Motor Learning: Implications for a Non-linear Pedagogy in Sport and Physical Education 2. Instructions as Constraints in Motor Skill ... The Ecological Dynamics of Decision-making in Sailing 12. ...
Annals of Leisure Research, 2020
ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that experiences in nature enhance mental wellbeing. However, we are y... more ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that experiences in nature enhance mental wellbeing. However, we are yet to clearly understand the processes through which this occurs. This study employed an exploratory qualitative approach to investigate how time spent in nature supports mental wellbeing. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 participants. Thematic analysis yielded three dominant themes: (1) ‘a sense of perspective’, (2) ‘mental and emotional sanctuary’ and (3) ‘being immersed in the moment’. Themes echoed relaxation and restoration of mental functioning, enhanced positive affect in natural environments and feelings of oneness with nature. However, participants also described experiences that reflected increased mindfulness, gratitude and awe, gaining a broader perspective on their concerns and feeling humbled in nature. Findings extend previous theoretical perspectives suggesting a more interactive relationship between people and their environment. The implications being that a more nuanced approach may better inform policy, research and practice in this area.
Phenomenology and the Extreme Sport Experience, 2017
A constraints-based framework enables a new understanding of expertise in outdoor adventure sport... more A constraints-based framework enables a new understanding of expertise in outdoor adventure sports by considering performer-environment couplings through emergent and self-organizing behaviours in relation to interacting constraints. Expert adventure athletes, conceptualized as complex, dynamical movement systems, pick up affordances for action to regulate adaptive transitions between functional movement behaviours. For example, icefall properties contain affordances that can induce variable motor coordination patterns in expertclimbers, whereas beginners use a basic and stable motor organization to achieve the main goal of maintaining body equilibrium with respect to gravity. Movement pattern variability could play a functional role as individuals adapt their behaviours to ecological constraints of performance by exhibiting multistability and metastability. The properties are exploitable by coaches and educators who can use system instability to stimulate creativity and skill acqui...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
The declining discovery rate of world-class ore deposits represents a significant obstacle to fut... more The declining discovery rate of world-class ore deposits represents a significant obstacle to future global metal supply. To counter this trend, there is a requirement for mineral exploration to be conducted in increasingly challenging, uncertain, and remote environments. Faced with such increases in task and environmental complexity, an important concern in exploratory activities are the behavioural challenges of information perception, interpretation and decision-making by geoscientists tasked with discovering the next generation of deposits. Here, we outline the Dynamics model, as a diagnostic tool for situational analysis and a guiding framework for designing working and training environments to maximise exploration performance. The Dynamics model is based on an Ecological Dynamics framework, combining Newell’s Constraints model, Self Determination Theory, and including feedback loops to define an autopoietic system. By implication of the Dynamics model, several areas are highli...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
Leisure Studies, 2019
More-than-human approaches open up theoretical and methodological space for considering if and ho... more More-than-human approaches open up theoretical and methodological space for considering if and how all animals, human and nonhuman, play important roles in shaping relationships, actions and encounters in leisure. This paper introduces an ecological-phenomenological framework for understanding relationships between animate actors and their environment in and through leisure. The example of human riders and horses in the context of a pleasure ride leisure event is used to illustrate the application of the framework for understanding the importance of individual differences and constraints, and their interaction with the environment, in appreciating the variety of affordances and possible outcomes in leisure practices. The ecological-phenomenological framework has theoretical and methodological implications for researchers of multispecies leisure, and may have practical application for event managers and designers of multispecies leisure activities. This article is important because it transforms current appreciation of multispecies leisure and opens doors to new ways of thinking and investigating the value and meaning of leisure in a multispecies context.
Frontiers in psychology, 2018
Drawing upon phenomenology and psychoanalytic concepts, we explore and explicate participants'... more Drawing upon phenomenology and psychoanalytic concepts, we explore and explicate participants' lived experience of the natural world. The authors draw upon Husserl's description of consciousness as intentionality and his later work on the life-world, in exploring experiences which provide a basis for a psychochoanalytic understanding of the human-nature experience. Unstructured interviews were undertaken with nine participants, each of whom regarded nature as being significant for their sense of wellbeing. The lived experiences were explicated drawing upon the two processes: Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological psychological methodology and psychoanalytic researcher reflexivity. Data analysis and explication involved the following steps: (1) a thorough reading of each interview transcript, (2) breaking data into parts by demarcating meaning units, (3) organizing data by translating meaning units into units of psychological experience through coding, and (4) arriving at ...
Frontiers in psychology, 2018
Anxiety is a significant mental health issue in modern society and empirical research into effect... more Anxiety is a significant mental health issue in modern society and empirical research into effective interventions to address anxiety has been extensive. Spending time in nature is one approach that has demonstrated anxiolytic effects. However, in some situations and contexts spending time in nature in order to reduce anxiety symptoms may not be possible. For example, in therapeutic settings delivered in a space with no access or exposure to any nature stimuli in the immediate surrounding environment. Guided imagery (GI) has also proven to be effective for reducing anxiety symptoms. Thus, nature-based GI might help to overcome the limitation of access to nature and strengthen the impact of GI interventions. The current study investigated the effectiveness of nature-based GI on anxiety reduction. Participants ( = 48, 18 males, 30 females, = 34.54, = 12.91, age range = 19 - 71 years) with moderate levels of either trait or state anxiety as measured by the state-trait anxiety inventory...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
Sports Medicine - Open, 2017
Previous research has considered action and adventure sports using a variety of associated terms ... more Previous research has considered action and adventure sports using a variety of associated terms and definitions which has led to confusing discourse and contradictory research findings. Traditional narratives have typically considered participation exclusively as the pastime of young people with abnormal characteristics or personalities having unhealthy and pathological tendencies to take risks because of the need for thrill, excitement or an adrenaline 'rush'. Conversely, recent research has linked even the most extreme forms of action and adventure sports to positive physical and psychological health and well-being outcomes. Here, we argue that traditional frameworks have led to definitions, which, as currently used by researchers, ignore key elements constituting the essential merit of these sports. In this paper, we suggest that this lack of conceptual clarity in understanding cognitions, perception and action in action and adventure sports requires a comprehensive explanatory framework, ecological dynamics which considers person-environment interactions from a multidisciplinary perspective. Action and adventure sports can be fundamentally conceptualized as activities which flourish through creative exploration of novel movement experiences, continuously expanding and evolving beyond predetermined environmental, physical, psychological or sociocultural boundaries. The outcome is the emergence of a rich variety of participation styles and philosophical differences within and across activities. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to point out some limitations of existing research on action and adventure sports; (b) based on key ideas from emerging research and an ecological dynamics approach, to propose a holistic multidisciplinary model for defining and understanding action and adventure sports that may better guide future research and practical implications.
Sports Medicine, 2016
Ideas in ecological dynamics have profound implications for designing environments that afford op... more Ideas in ecological dynamics have profound implications for designing environments that afford opportunities for physical activity, exercise and play in humans. They imply how exercise scientists, health professionals, planners, designers and engineers, and psychologists, can collaborate in co-design environments and playscapes that facilitate physical activity and exercise participation in different population subgroups. Here, we discuss how ideas in ecological dynamics emphasise the person-environment scale of analysis indicating how physical activity environments might be (re)designed into qualitative regions of functional significance (affordances) for interactions that invite behaviours from individuals with reciprocal capacities and skills (effectivities).
Sports Medicine, 2015
Increasing evidence supports the multiple benefits to physical, psychological and emotional wellb... more Increasing evidence supports the multiple benefits to physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing, of green physical activity, a topic of increasing interest in the past decade. Research has revealed a synergistic benefit of green physical activity, which includes all aspects of exercise and physical activity in the presence of nature. Our theoretical analysis suggests that there are three distinct levels of engagement in green physical activity, with each level reported to have a positive effect on human behaviours. However, the extent to which each level of green physical activity benefits health and wellbeing is assumed to differ, requiring confirmation in future research. This elucidation of understanding is needed because previous literature has tended to focus on recording empirical evidence, rather than developing a sound theoretical framework to understand green physical activity effects. Here we propose an ecological dynamics rationale to explain how and why green physical activity might influence health and wellbeing of different population groups. This framework suggests a number of unexplored, interacting constraints, related to types of environment and population groups, which shape reported levels of benefit of green physical activity. Further analysis is needed to clarify the explicit relationship between green physical activity and health and wellbeing, including levels of engagement, types of environmental constraints, levels of physical activity, adventure effects, skill effects and sampling of different populations. Key points Previous literature has typically provided an operational analysis of the benefits of physical activity undertaken in nature and future work needs to understand how and why green physical activity might influence health and wellbeing with a multidisciplinary rationale. Further investigation of interacting constraints on green physical activity effects is needed, including levels of engagement, types of environment, level of physical activity, adventure, skill effects and groups. An ecological dynamics framework has the potential to provide principles for the design of green physical activity programmes as well as experiments on this topic.
Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2013
The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked f... more The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis.
Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 2015
included students of varying skill level). The efficacy of the CLA in skill development was clear... more included students of varying skill level). The efficacy of the CLA in skill development was clearly an important mediator of receptiveness for highly successful products of a traditional culture. This significant finding could be explained by three key factors: the acculturation of the participants, the motor learning theory underpinning the alternative pedagogy and the unit learning design and delivery. The inclusive nature of the CLA provided a solution to the problem of exclusion, which also made the approach attractive to participants. Conclusion: PETE educators could consider these findings when introducing an alternative pedagogy aimed at challenging PETE recruits' custodial, traditional teaching beliefs. To mediate receptiveness, it is important that the learning theory underpinning the alternative approach is operationalised in a research-informed pedagogical learning design that facilitates students' perceptions of the effectiveness of the approach through experiencing and or observing it working.
Lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases are on the increase wor... more Lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases are on the increase worldwide. This study examines the distinctive effects of exercise in green space compared to other contexts. There is growing evidence that physical activity in nature has considerable positive effects on human health far beyond those benefits assumed by physical activity alone, despite a reduction in opportunities for green exercise. A systematic literature review was undertaken to examine the evidence on the importance of physical activity in green space from different theoretical sub-disciplines including psychiatry, psychology, outdoor education, sport and exercise psychology and leisure, and recreation. Thematic categories were created to establish the effects of green space and green exercise on different yet inter-linked aspects of human health and well-being, both physical as well as mental. Our systematic review led us to apply ideas from a new theoretical perspective that contributes to existing understanding of how physical activity in green spaces (green exercise) might provide physical benefits and enhance mental health and wellbeing. This perspective, known as Ecological Dynamics, focuses on the relationship between the individual and environment in providing a functional explanation for the enhancement of physical and mental health and wellbeing. From this study it is theoretically rationalised that physical activity in green space, compared to other popular contexts, is more effective in enhancing physical and psycho-social wellbeing.
Centre for Health Research; Faculty of Health; Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation; School of Exercise & Nutrition Sciences, Mar 10, 2010
... Table of Contents Part 1 1. The Constraints-based Approach to Motor Learning: Implic... more ... Table of Contents Part 1 1. The Constraints-based Approach to Motor Learning: Implications for a Non-linear Pedagogy in Sport and Physical Education 2. Instructions as Constraints in Motor Skill ... The Ecological Dynamics of Decision-making in Sailing 12. ...
Annals of Leisure Research, 2020
ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that experiences in nature enhance mental wellbeing. However, we are y... more ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that experiences in nature enhance mental wellbeing. However, we are yet to clearly understand the processes through which this occurs. This study employed an exploratory qualitative approach to investigate how time spent in nature supports mental wellbeing. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 participants. Thematic analysis yielded three dominant themes: (1) ‘a sense of perspective’, (2) ‘mental and emotional sanctuary’ and (3) ‘being immersed in the moment’. Themes echoed relaxation and restoration of mental functioning, enhanced positive affect in natural environments and feelings of oneness with nature. However, participants also described experiences that reflected increased mindfulness, gratitude and awe, gaining a broader perspective on their concerns and feeling humbled in nature. Findings extend previous theoretical perspectives suggesting a more interactive relationship between people and their environment. The implications being that a more nuanced approach may better inform policy, research and practice in this area.
Phenomenology and the Extreme Sport Experience, 2017
A constraints-based framework enables a new understanding of expertise in outdoor adventure sport... more A constraints-based framework enables a new understanding of expertise in outdoor adventure sports by considering performer-environment couplings through emergent and self-organizing behaviours in relation to interacting constraints. Expert adventure athletes, conceptualized as complex, dynamical movement systems, pick up affordances for action to regulate adaptive transitions between functional movement behaviours. For example, icefall properties contain affordances that can induce variable motor coordination patterns in expertclimbers, whereas beginners use a basic and stable motor organization to achieve the main goal of maintaining body equilibrium with respect to gravity. Movement pattern variability could play a functional role as individuals adapt their behaviours to ecological constraints of performance by exhibiting multistability and metastability. The properties are exploitable by coaches and educators who can use system instability to stimulate creativity and skill acqui...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
The declining discovery rate of world-class ore deposits represents a significant obstacle to fut... more The declining discovery rate of world-class ore deposits represents a significant obstacle to future global metal supply. To counter this trend, there is a requirement for mineral exploration to be conducted in increasingly challenging, uncertain, and remote environments. Faced with such increases in task and environmental complexity, an important concern in exploratory activities are the behavioural challenges of information perception, interpretation and decision-making by geoscientists tasked with discovering the next generation of deposits. Here, we outline the Dynamics model, as a diagnostic tool for situational analysis and a guiding framework for designing working and training environments to maximise exploration performance. The Dynamics model is based on an Ecological Dynamics framework, combining Newell’s Constraints model, Self Determination Theory, and including feedback loops to define an autopoietic system. By implication of the Dynamics model, several areas are highli...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
Leisure Studies, 2019
More-than-human approaches open up theoretical and methodological space for considering if and ho... more More-than-human approaches open up theoretical and methodological space for considering if and how all animals, human and nonhuman, play important roles in shaping relationships, actions and encounters in leisure. This paper introduces an ecological-phenomenological framework for understanding relationships between animate actors and their environment in and through leisure. The example of human riders and horses in the context of a pleasure ride leisure event is used to illustrate the application of the framework for understanding the importance of individual differences and constraints, and their interaction with the environment, in appreciating the variety of affordances and possible outcomes in leisure practices. The ecological-phenomenological framework has theoretical and methodological implications for researchers of multispecies leisure, and may have practical application for event managers and designers of multispecies leisure activities. This article is important because it transforms current appreciation of multispecies leisure and opens doors to new ways of thinking and investigating the value and meaning of leisure in a multispecies context.
Frontiers in psychology, 2018
Drawing upon phenomenology and psychoanalytic concepts, we explore and explicate participants'... more Drawing upon phenomenology and psychoanalytic concepts, we explore and explicate participants' lived experience of the natural world. The authors draw upon Husserl's description of consciousness as intentionality and his later work on the life-world, in exploring experiences which provide a basis for a psychochoanalytic understanding of the human-nature experience. Unstructured interviews were undertaken with nine participants, each of whom regarded nature as being significant for their sense of wellbeing. The lived experiences were explicated drawing upon the two processes: Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological psychological methodology and psychoanalytic researcher reflexivity. Data analysis and explication involved the following steps: (1) a thorough reading of each interview transcript, (2) breaking data into parts by demarcating meaning units, (3) organizing data by translating meaning units into units of psychological experience through coding, and (4) arriving at ...
Frontiers in psychology, 2018
Anxiety is a significant mental health issue in modern society and empirical research into effect... more Anxiety is a significant mental health issue in modern society and empirical research into effective interventions to address anxiety has been extensive. Spending time in nature is one approach that has demonstrated anxiolytic effects. However, in some situations and contexts spending time in nature in order to reduce anxiety symptoms may not be possible. For example, in therapeutic settings delivered in a space with no access or exposure to any nature stimuli in the immediate surrounding environment. Guided imagery (GI) has also proven to be effective for reducing anxiety symptoms. Thus, nature-based GI might help to overcome the limitation of access to nature and strengthen the impact of GI interventions. The current study investigated the effectiveness of nature-based GI on anxiety reduction. Participants ( = 48, 18 males, 30 females, = 34.54, = 12.91, age range = 19 - 71 years) with moderate levels of either trait or state anxiety as measured by the state-trait anxiety inventory...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
Sports Medicine - Open, 2017
Previous research has considered action and adventure sports using a variety of associated terms ... more Previous research has considered action and adventure sports using a variety of associated terms and definitions which has led to confusing discourse and contradictory research findings. Traditional narratives have typically considered participation exclusively as the pastime of young people with abnormal characteristics or personalities having unhealthy and pathological tendencies to take risks because of the need for thrill, excitement or an adrenaline 'rush'. Conversely, recent research has linked even the most extreme forms of action and adventure sports to positive physical and psychological health and well-being outcomes. Here, we argue that traditional frameworks have led to definitions, which, as currently used by researchers, ignore key elements constituting the essential merit of these sports. In this paper, we suggest that this lack of conceptual clarity in understanding cognitions, perception and action in action and adventure sports requires a comprehensive explanatory framework, ecological dynamics which considers person-environment interactions from a multidisciplinary perspective. Action and adventure sports can be fundamentally conceptualized as activities which flourish through creative exploration of novel movement experiences, continuously expanding and evolving beyond predetermined environmental, physical, psychological or sociocultural boundaries. The outcome is the emergence of a rich variety of participation styles and philosophical differences within and across activities. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to point out some limitations of existing research on action and adventure sports; (b) based on key ideas from emerging research and an ecological dynamics approach, to propose a holistic multidisciplinary model for defining and understanding action and adventure sports that may better guide future research and practical implications.
Sports Medicine, 2016
Ideas in ecological dynamics have profound implications for designing environments that afford op... more Ideas in ecological dynamics have profound implications for designing environments that afford opportunities for physical activity, exercise and play in humans. They imply how exercise scientists, health professionals, planners, designers and engineers, and psychologists, can collaborate in co-design environments and playscapes that facilitate physical activity and exercise participation in different population subgroups. Here, we discuss how ideas in ecological dynamics emphasise the person-environment scale of analysis indicating how physical activity environments might be (re)designed into qualitative regions of functional significance (affordances) for interactions that invite behaviours from individuals with reciprocal capacities and skills (effectivities).
Sports Medicine, 2015
Increasing evidence supports the multiple benefits to physical, psychological and emotional wellb... more Increasing evidence supports the multiple benefits to physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing, of green physical activity, a topic of increasing interest in the past decade. Research has revealed a synergistic benefit of green physical activity, which includes all aspects of exercise and physical activity in the presence of nature. Our theoretical analysis suggests that there are three distinct levels of engagement in green physical activity, with each level reported to have a positive effect on human behaviours. However, the extent to which each level of green physical activity benefits health and wellbeing is assumed to differ, requiring confirmation in future research. This elucidation of understanding is needed because previous literature has tended to focus on recording empirical evidence, rather than developing a sound theoretical framework to understand green physical activity effects. Here we propose an ecological dynamics rationale to explain how and why green physical activity might influence health and wellbeing of different population groups. This framework suggests a number of unexplored, interacting constraints, related to types of environment and population groups, which shape reported levels of benefit of green physical activity. Further analysis is needed to clarify the explicit relationship between green physical activity and health and wellbeing, including levels of engagement, types of environmental constraints, levels of physical activity, adventure effects, skill effects and sampling of different populations. Key points Previous literature has typically provided an operational analysis of the benefits of physical activity undertaken in nature and future work needs to understand how and why green physical activity might influence health and wellbeing with a multidisciplinary rationale. Further investigation of interacting constraints on green physical activity effects is needed, including levels of engagement, types of environment, level of physical activity, adventure, skill effects and groups. An ecological dynamics framework has the potential to provide principles for the design of green physical activity programmes as well as experiments on this topic.
Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2013
The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked f... more The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis.
Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 2015
included students of varying skill level). The efficacy of the CLA in skill development was clear... more included students of varying skill level). The efficacy of the CLA in skill development was clearly an important mediator of receptiveness for highly successful products of a traditional culture. This significant finding could be explained by three key factors: the acculturation of the participants, the motor learning theory underpinning the alternative pedagogy and the unit learning design and delivery. The inclusive nature of the CLA provided a solution to the problem of exclusion, which also made the approach attractive to participants. Conclusion: PETE educators could consider these findings when introducing an alternative pedagogy aimed at challenging PETE recruits' custodial, traditional teaching beliefs. To mediate receptiveness, it is important that the learning theory underpinning the alternative approach is operationalised in a research-informed pedagogical learning design that facilitates students' perceptions of the effectiveness of the approach through experiencing and or observing it working.
Lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases are on the increase wor... more Lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases are on the increase worldwide. This study examines the distinctive effects of exercise in green space compared to other contexts. There is growing evidence that physical activity in nature has considerable positive effects on human health far beyond those benefits assumed by physical activity alone, despite a reduction in opportunities for green exercise. A systematic literature review was undertaken to examine the evidence on the importance of physical activity in green space from different theoretical sub-disciplines including psychiatry, psychology, outdoor education, sport and exercise psychology and leisure, and recreation. Thematic categories were created to establish the effects of green space and green exercise on different yet inter-linked aspects of human health and well-being, both physical as well as mental. Our systematic review led us to apply ideas from a new theoretical perspective that contributes to existing understanding of how physical activity in green spaces (green exercise) might provide physical benefits and enhance mental health and wellbeing. This perspective, known as Ecological Dynamics, focuses on the relationship between the individual and environment in providing a functional explanation for the enhancement of physical and mental health and wellbeing. From this study it is theoretically rationalised that physical activity in green space, compared to other popular contexts, is more effective in enhancing physical and psycho-social wellbeing.