Sport Psychology Flashcards
What is sport psychology?
A science that focuses on psychological principles in the sport or exercise setting.
Helps participants to reach their potential as athletes.
Sometimes this might include looking at their confidence, or motivation while for others it might be self control.
Sport psychologists focus on the psychology surround athletes. Who also may utilise their research?
Coaches and athletes.
Self confidence in sport psychology
Self confidence and motivation are closely related.
Global self confidence is dispositional, and relates to a more general form of confidence.
Situation specific self confidence may be where an athlete is confidence they can make a goal under pressure.
Both are important in the development of motivation.
Self efficacy in sport psychology
Form of situational specific self confidence
Belief in your ability to execute the actions required to produces a desired outcome. Strong predictor of athletic performance.
Groups that exhibit it also tend to perform better then those without.
Where does self efficacy come from?
- Successful performance
- Vicarious experience. Can be observed by observing others successful performance. Participatory modelling involves observing performance of someone else and then attempting to perform same action.
- Verbal persuasion (encouragement, self talk)
- Emotional arousal.
What is psychological momentum?
Taylor and Demick, 1994 defined it as a positive or negative change in cognition, affect, physiology, and behaviour, caused by an event or series of events that will result in a commensurate shift in performance and competitive outcome.
What is he hot hand phenomenon?
Related to psychological momentum.
In basketball, it is the idea that performance temporarily improves after a string of successors. Research has debated whether this is legit or an actual phenomenon. An illusion due to cognitive biases because we overall just remember positive experiences?
Hot hand evidence weakly supported. Equal probability of hitting regardless of good or bad performance. Challenges psychological momentum.
Arousal in relation to performance (sport psychology)
State anxiety (arousal) connected to athletic performance. The inverted U theory describes the normally distributed relationship between performance and arousal (moderate arousal results in increased performance, too much or little decreases performance).
Complex tasks need less arousal to be completed, but simple tasks need more arousal for completion.
Another example, experts need more arousal to perform successfully then beginners. Why players prefer competitive.
What’s an alternative view to the inverted U hypothesis?
Individual zone of optimal functioning.
Originally focused on anxiety, how can be used more broadly.
Optimal levels of anxiety differ from person to person.
Control techniques can be used to fall into optimum range.
Unhelpful stress that hinders athletes performance?
Worrying about Failure Injury Opponents Evaluation
Coping with stressors in athletes
Tend to use an approach style of coping as oppose to avoidance
Problem or action focused. (Identify coping strategies by sport psychologist)
Many use self talk, primary categories are:
- task specific statements
- encouragement
- mood words
Self talk leads to athletic performance
Anxiety stress spiral (athletes are anxious about losing them make a bad score).
What are some relaxation techniques that athletes use?
Progressive relaxation (tensing then releasing muscles)
Autogenic training (feeling of warm sensation)
Meditation
Biofeedback (allows atheletes to view which stimuli increases heart rate)
Energising strategies
Pep talks (coach/high energy self talk)
Music (can evoke a sense of power)
Physical movement
