Class notes - 2 - 10 Flashcards
Effort praise + failure:
high enjoyment; high willingness to continue
2nd type of misregulation: trying to control the uncontrollable
It is best to not try to control it
Example: choking in performance setting
Choking: dramatic underperformance compared to practice or at less important competition
Elite athletes and musicians are best when they trust their training and do not think much about specifics of what they are doing
Not trusting automatic responses and stopping to think and control results in lower speed and accuracy
Ericsson wrongly believes that Flow is incompatible with Deliberate practice
Contrary to Ericsson’s belief, experiencing positive affect isn’t a key component of flow
- Flow is a consciousness, a mental state of being immersed and focused in the present moment.
- Ericsson is making deliberate practice come off as very difficult and associated with negative affect.
There are two types of eaters:
intuitive or controlled
- Rely on hunger (intuitive) or control eating through willpower (controlled)
- Intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight and spend less time thinking about food
- Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to environmental triggers, a small indulgence leading to a food binge.
Autonomous goals
Mediating factors
- Greater effort
- Less conflict with other goals
- Capacity to shield goals from distraction and temptation
- Autonomous goals make you better at doing this
- Capacity to overcome action crises
How can we help young people be more accepting of different physical sizes and eating tendencies?
self-acceptance, fitness and healthy eating and mindfulness
Superior Basic Abilities
Absolute pitch (perfect pitch): among musicians, the ability to recognize or sing a given isolated note
daily experience sampling
Participants are beeped randomly throughout the day. When they are, they fill out booklets given to them. Allows monitoring of how our experience fluctuates throughout the day, depending on the activities we engage in.
how do we disengage from valued goals and find new goals?
The Goal Action Sequence: selection –> engagement –> disengagement
- Student-relevant examples: not being able to continue with desired career goal or with sport/musical activity
- Large percentage of pre-med and music students abandon their goal once in university. However, quitting has a bad reputation.
Ability praise + failure:
low enjoyment; low willingness to continue
Jennifer Heil in 2006 and 2010
Heil had physical problems from training and felt mentally unprepared when she competed in 2002. However, when she competed in 2010, she felt ready and calm- more so than usual. When competing, she just “let it go” and allowed her body to take over. She knew that with thousands of hours spent practicing and a support team with the right resources, she would never be more prepared than she already was.
Why did Tiger Woods become so good
- Early exposure
- Extensive training
- Highly involved parents
Also… a keen interest and high self-control.
mother-daughter example: brooke raboutou
Brooke is a rock-climber that is incomparably talented to others her age
Very evident passion for her talent domain
- Feels in control and happy
- Always challenging herself
- However, Brooke’s mother is also her coach. This may be problematic as the relationship becomes more complicated.
Brooke is always driven to take things a step further. On top of the cliff, she feels in-control and isn’t scared
- Has all six components of flow
- Good chance of emerging as an Olympic athlete
- Brooke’s other coach made the comment that while rock climbing, you cannot have a lapse in concentration but must be totally focused and immersed.
Kohn what distinguishes healthy self-control
seligman conclusions on weight
Natural weight is largely genetically determined.
- There is a fixed range in which our weight can fluctuate.
The body will vigorously defend this weight by making you intensely preoccupied with food and causing metabolic changes
- After a successful diet, body believes we are living through a famine
- Evolutionarily prepared to defend weight.
Our natural weight may be quite discrepant from ideal weight.
- Ideal weight is continuously decreasing over time, making discrepancy more striking
- Feeling more like we shouldn’t weigh as much as we do
home environments of youngsters who become elite performers
- Child-oriented
- Achievement-oriented
- Responsibility oriented
sexual involvement is a good way to discourage romantic love.
Baumeister’s analysis:
No challenge, no skill: watching TV
APATHY
Proving Koestner’s TV defenses wrong:
- TV watching is a fuller, more rich experience if we watch with others. We feel more absorbed and interested. However, this positive effect of doing things with others is true for all activities. Thus, on the whole, TV watching is still the least rewarding in terms of flow.
- Being a professor is the second-least most stressful job (first least stressful is being a nun)
- Most genres involve the same negative consequences
Flow:
sense of effortless action felt in moments that stand out as the best in our lives
The False Hope Syndrome
- Initial Expectations
- Unrealistic, that we will lose a lot of weight quickly & easily – this will dramatically change many aspects of our life
- Commitment to Change
- Tell ourselves, and others, about our goal because we feel we are “addressing this”
- Other people are encouraging; we get reinforced
- Tell ourselves, and others, about our goal because we feel we are “addressing this”
- Initial Efforts
- Seem to work pretty well, regardless of which diet you are trying
- Resistance to Change
- After about a month we plateau, we are no longer losing weight doing the same things from before. This reflects the body’s defenses kicking in (metabolism!), there will be resistance now. People try to struggle through this, but normally cant manage it.
- Failure/Abandonment
- We give up on the goal.
- Attributions
- Same error we always make. If you blame on a stable thing, you won’t try it again. 2 reasons – I didn’t keep my effort up (didn’t have enough will power) – this is changeable!, and they blame their diet (external/changeable/unstable thing)
- If you blame something stable, like genes, you would be less likely to try again
- Same error we always make. If you blame on a stable thing, you won’t try it again. 2 reasons – I didn’t keep my effort up (didn’t have enough will power) – this is changeable!, and they blame their diet (external/changeable/unstable thing)
- Emotional, behavioral, and physiological consequences
- Process of having to try to lose weight is brought with a lot of negative emotions.
The pursuer tends to overrate how attractive they are,
while the pursued does not
theories to support ability praise - reinforcement
- Reinforcement
Praise can be a social reinforce: children like to be praised, making it more likely that they will engage in behaviors that elicit praise more frequently
psychology skills training
- Goal setting
- Many make the common mistake of setting too many goals and never lowering their goals, despite injuries
- Sports psychologists train athletes to not focus too much on outcome goals but on process goals
- Before the Olympics, athletes are trained not to think about the medals but doing their personal best
- Recommended to compare your current performance with your own past performance, not other competitors’ performance
- Terrible mistake of putting medal ceremony uniform in athlete’s suitcase increased pressure (others’ expectations that they will win)
- Arousal regulation
- Involves relaxation training and learning how to modulate arousal (calm, not hyper)
- There are very few sports, such as power sports, that require an increase in arousal
- Visualization
- Involves mentally rehearsing the path or route that will be taken during the competition
- Important that it involves the full sensory experience, not just visual
- Self-talk
- Involves engagement in internal dialogue, which is naturally mostly negative and unhelpful
- Sports psychologists find 2-3 simple thoughts that athletes could focus on to keep out anxiety-provoking thoughts
Dweck sited Koestner’s dissertation, in which participants received false feedback regarding either their ability or effort. Participants who received ability-related praise had more intrinsic motivation. However
Dweck commented that Koestner failed to consider two problems in the experiment set-up:
-
All participants succeeded. In real life, this rarely occurs.
* In an important domain, most of us experience challenge and failure at some point. What happens during this period is important. -
Short and long-term impact of praise are not distinguished
* There is momentary happiness associated with praise in the short-term, but the long-term impact may be different.
Happiness is different from
flow
second pattern for unrequited love
- Intrusion of romantic feelings into a platonic friendship
- Intimacy and time spent with friend results in emergence of romantic feelings.
- Note that we do not choose friends based on attractiveness
Methods for Arousal Regulation
A focus plan, such as a pre-performance routine, that will focus attention and manage anxiety during the competition is very important
- The worst thing you could do is watch others perform.
Kerrigan is a good practice but not so good competition performer However, when she switched from listening to rock-and-roll music to watching comedy clips prior to her performance, it helped clam her down. This new pre-performance routine benefit her a lot.
Wayne recommends that athletes make a list of things they believe about themselves
- Results in feeling more relaxed and increases self-efficacy
- Not thinking about other things that could potentially bring down performance
Tiger Woods had the same pre-performance routine since age 10
- Practicing putting, a fine motor skill that is easy to mess up, with precise timing increased likelihood of enacting swing in perfect manner almost unconsciously if practiced in the same manner over and over again.
1st pattern for unrequited love
- Falling upwards
- Most common
- Falling for someone who is more attractive and out of our league
- Physical attraction plays a large role, despite there being other aspects of attractiveness
- Physical attraction is easiest to measure
how is unrequited love experienced?Pursued:
- lingering negative feelings
- No win situation
- Feel awkward and uncomfortable
why do we watch TV?
According to Csziksentmihalyi,
if we let our consciousness run freely, it finds a state of entropy or chaos, which is the natural state of our mind.
- We watch TV because it is the easiest, most accessible, and least expensive way to provide order to our consciousness
- Wards off anxious and depressive feelings.
- TV is designed to prey on the orienting reflex, involving new scenes that are so hypnotizing that watchers are left with no choice but to continue watching.
typical stages of involvement phase II
moderate skill building; internalization
- Around age 5-7, parents typically find a coach
- Sign up for classes or training locally, not always the best
- Parents look for someone good with children, someone who makes the activity fun and interesting
- Distinctive in terms of personality: warm and supportive
- However, there is still some focus on skill-building
- For example, teachers can tell when the child has not practiced and done their homework
- Parents play a vital role in internalization: teaching the instrumental value of practicing
Best Evidence for the Talent View?
- Performance of prodigies: children who acquire expert levels of performance at a very young age
- Performance of savants: individuals with under average intelligence who display unusual abilities that others do not have
- Seemingly superior basic abilities that predestine one for success in a certain domain
- Absolute pitch in music; spatial memory in chess
Dweck on Ericsson
- It is more adaptive to not believe in natural talent, as it sets up for choosing the wrong set of goals and responding badly to failure
- It is healthier to frame things in terms of effort and strategies, without being limited by lack of innate talent.
- This may be especially important for parents and teachers when working with children
Goal Adjustment Model
Disengagement doesn’t occur naturally; one must be aware of the important of disengaging and put their minds to the process of disengagement.
If pursuing a goal, especially one that is important and long-term, it is normal to encounter action crises
Difficulty with goal attainment leads to judging the opportunity for success
- Good opportunity: redouble effort and commitment
- Try things differently and continue with goal pursuit
- Poor opportunity: begin disengagement process and engage in pursuit of other goal
Ability praise: interested in social comparison
Effort praise: tips on how to improve
ability to delay gratification
predictive of school and social performance
Psychology or Mental Skills
- The key deciding factor is whether the athlete is able to be the best even under stressful conditions.
- Mental training can be attributed to about 50-90% of success for figure skating
According to Koestner, Three Ways to Extend Self-Control
- Select autonomous goals
- Make goal pursuit automatic with implementation plans
- Find (the right kind of) interpersonal support
Using Psychological Skills Training To Develop Soccer Performance
Multimodal interventions:
- Relaxation training
- Visualization
- Positive self-talk
There was a significant increase in pre- and post-training outcomes
- Percentage of completed passes increased from 66% to 74% and caught passes from 72% to 79%
- However, there was no control group
Accumulated deliberate practice:
amount of weekly practice and age at which the individual began
Performance feedback is very important for learning; children must know how they are doing, either through the test score or task itself.
This is different from praise, which is not needed and has associated risks.
Bedard:
- One of the first women to participate in the biathlon.
- Score of 75 on cardiovascular measures, which is higher than most other athletes
- Her belief in a God-given talent would be unbelievable to Ericsson, who would attribute her success to training
- Playing and competing doesn’t help you get better; only deliberate practice helps you get better
- We have to learn what is the best deliberate practice for your domain
- These insights will be especially helpful in our everyday lives, as a worker, amateur performer and parent
x
seligman advice
focus on self-acceptance, healthy eating and fitness
Purposeful practice:
deliberate, goal-directed practice without teacher guidance
theories to support ability praise - expectancy
- If children are given a positive expectation for their future behavior, they may behave in ways that orient towards fulfilling this expectation
- In one study, ½ of children were told that their test results show they will blossom in upcoming school year. The other ½ were told they would not. There was random assignment, ensuring equal baseline ability. It was found that children told they would blossom performed much better.
High challenge, high skill:
- sports and hobbies (enjoyment)
Koestner at the Ferrata Parc Nationale Des Grands Jardins
Had no opportunity to think about other things- required full focus on activity ahead
The beauty of flow activity is that there is no time to be self-conscious; the task is too demanding
- Enables turning off rumination about negative memories
- Some of our worst experiences are when we were self-conscious