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
