The home advantage (HA) is a robust phenomenon in football whereby the home team wins more games and scores more goals than the away team. One explanation is that the home crowd spurs on home team performance and causes the referee to unconsciously favour the home team. The Covid-19 (COVID) pandemic provided a unique opportunity to assess this explanation for HA, as European football leagues played part of the 2019/2020 season with crowds present and concluded with crowds absent. Using multi-level modelling we compared team performance and referee decisions pre-COVID (crowd present) and during-COVID (crowd absent) across 4844 games from 15 leagues in 11 countries. HA (goals scored and points gained) was significantly reduced during-COVID, which reflected the inferior performance of the home team. In games without fans, home teams created significantly fewer attacking opportunities and referee-bias was diluted when controlling for the attacking dominance of teams; such that the number of fouls and yellow cards ruled against away sides, while still significant, was reduced and no effects were observed for red cards. Implications for sporting practice and directions for future research are discussed.

The home advantage (HA) is a robust phenomenon in soccer whereby the home team wins more games and scores more goals than the away team. One explanation is that the home crowd spurs on home team performance and causes the referee to unconsciously favour the home team. The Covid-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to assess this explanation for HA, as European soccer leagues played part of the 2019/2020 season with crowds present and concluded with crowds absent. Using multi-level modelling we compared team performance and referee decisions pre-Covid (crowd present) and post-Covid (crowd absent) across 9,528 games from 15 leagues in 11 countries. HA (goals scored and points gained) was significantly reduced post pandemic, which reflected the inferior performance of the home team. In addition, referees awarded significantly fewer sanctions against the away teams, and home teams created significantly fewer attacking opportunities when they played without fans.

Evidence suggests that perseverative cognition (PC), the cognitive representation of past stressful events (rumination) or feared future events (worry), mediates the relationship between stress and physical disease. However, the experimental evidence testing methods to influence PC and the subsequent relationship with health outcomes has not been synthesised. Therefore, the current review addressed these gaps. MethodsStudies randomly assigning participants to treatment and control groups, measuring PC and a physical and/or behavioural health outcome after exposure to a non-pharmacological intervention, were included in a systematic review. Key terms were searched in Medline, PsycInfo and CINAHL databases. Of the screened studies (k = 10,703), 36 met the eligibility criteria. ResultsRandom-effects meta-analyses revealed the interventions, relative to comparison groups, on average produced medium-sized effects on rumination (g = -.58), small-to-medium sized effects on worry (g = -.41) and health behaviours (g = .31), and small-sized effects on physical health outcomes (g = .23). Effect sizes for PC were positively associated with effect sizes for health behaviours (following outlier removal). Effect sizes for PC were significantly larger when interventions were delivered by healthcare professionals than when delivered via all other methods. No specific intervention type (when directly compared against other types) was associated with larger effect sizes for PC. ConclusionsPsychological interventions can influence PC. Medium-sized effect sizes for PC correspond with small, but positive associations with health behaviours.

Several lab-based studies have indicated that when people are hungry, they judge larger women's bodies as more attractive, compared to when they are satiated. These satiety-dependent judgements are assumed to provide explanatory power when it comes to the noted cross-cultural differences in attitudes towards women's adiposity, whereby people who live in regions that are under greater nutritional stress tend to have more favourable attitudes towards bigger bodies. However, it is premature to assume that women's bodies are the proper or actual domain of the satiety-dependent judgement shifts found within research study testing contexts until stimuli other than female bodies have also been tested: the research programme falls into the trap of confirmation bias unless we also seek out disconfirmatory evidence, and test the boundaries of the effects of hunger. Accordingly, we collected attractiveness judgements of female and male bodies manipulated to vary in size by varying level of adiposity, and objects manipulated to vary in size, from 186 participants who also reported their current hunger level. We found that larger sizes of stimuli in general, and women's bodies in particular, especially when judged by women, were judged as more attractive by the hungrier participants. We discuss these patterns in the context of the Insurance Hypothesis, the Environmental Security Hypothesis, and the impact of hunger on acquisition.

Cataract removal surgery is one of the most commonly performed surgical procedure in developed countries. The financial and staff resource cost that first-eye cataract surgery incurs, leads to restricted access to second-eye cataract surgery (SES) in some areas, including the United Kingdom. These restrictions have been imposed despite a lack of knowledge about the impact of not performing SES on visuo-motor function. To this end, a systematic literature review was carried out, with the aim of synthesising our present understanding of the effects of SES on motor function. Key terms were searched across four databases, PsycINFO, Medline, Web of Science, and CINAHL. Of the screened studies (K = 499) 13 met the eligibility criteria. The homogeneity between participants, study-design and outcome measures across these studies was not sufficient for meta-analyses and a narrative synthesis was carried out. The evidence from objective sources indicates a positive effect of SES on both mobility and fall rates, however, when considering self-report measures, the reduction in falls associated with SES becomes negligible. The evidence for any positive effect of SES on driving is also mixed, whereby SES was associated with improvements in simulated driving performance but was not associated with changes in driving behaviours measured through in vehicle monitoring. Self-report measures of driving performance also returned inconsistent results. Whilst SES appears to be associated with a general trend towards improved motor function, more evidence is needed to reach any firm conclusions and to best advise policy regarding access to SES in an ageing population.Systematic Review Registration:https://osf.io/7hne6/, identifier INPLASY2020100042.