Chapter 8 - Psychology of Athletic Preparation and Perfromance Flashcards
The Ideal Performance State:
- Absence of fear - no fear of failure.
- No thinking about or analysis of performance (related to the motor stage of automaticity).
- A narrow focus of attention concentrated on the activity itself.
- A sense of effortlessness - an involuntary experience
- A sense of personal control
- A distortion of time and space, in which time seems to slow.
The individual’s negative perception of a situation.
Cognitive Anxiety
Evidenced through physical symtoms such as tense muscles, tachycardia, and upset stomach.
Somatic Anxiety
An actual experience of apprehension and uncontrolled arousal.
State Anxiety
A personality characteristic, which represents a latent disposition to perceieve situations as threatening.
Trait Anxiety
- Proposes that an individual’s arousal or state anxiety increases, so does performance.
- Most would argue that more arousal is not always better, as performers can clearly be “too pumped” to perform well.
- The more skill an athlete has developed, the better he or she can perform during states of less-than or greater-than-optimal arousal.
- The optimal arousal point is lower for less skilled athletes than for more advanced players.
- Simple or well-learned skills are less affected by a high degree of arousal because they have frew task-relevant cues to monitor.
- Skills involving a lot of decision making require low levels of arousal.
Drive Theory
Arousal faciilitates performance up to an optimal level, beyond which further increases in arousal are associated with reduced performance.
Inverted U-Theory
Different people, in different types of performances, peform best with very different levels of arousal.
- Ideal performance does not seem to always have to occur at the midpoint of the arousal continuum.
- Rather than there being a single defined arousal point at whcich optimal perforamnce occurs, this best peformance can occur within a small range, or bandwidth, of arousal level.
- Any specific emotion can be positively perceived by one athlete but negatvely perceieved by another.
Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning Theory
- Somatic arousal has a curvilinear, inverted U-relationship to athletic performance, whereas cognitive anxiety shows a steady negative relationship to performance.
- When increases increases in physiological arousal occur in the presence of cognitive anxiety, a sudeen drop, rather than a gradaul decline in performance occurs.
Catastrophe Theory
- The way in which arousal and anxiety affect performance depends on the individuals’ interpretations of that arousal.
- This idea implies that athletes have within their power the ability to reverse their interpretation of their own arousal.
- It emphasizes that one’s interpreation of arousal, and not just its amount, is significant.
Reversal Theory
An act of increasing the probability of occurence of a given behaior by following it with a postive action.
Postive Reinforcement
Increases the probability of occurence of a given operant, but it is accomplished through the removal of an act.
Negative Reinforcement
Presentation of an act, object, or event following a behavior that could decrease the behavior’s occurence.
Positive Punishment
The removal of something valued, could take the form of revoking privileges or playing time, as in benching.
Negative Punishment
Attention Style - An introspective versus an externally oriented perspective.
Internal-External
Attention Style - An integrative (expansive) versus a highly selective orientation.
Broad-Narrow
Focusing thought on breathing clears the mind and therefore increases attentional capacity.
Diaphragmatic Breathing
