Summary
Sport and Performance Psychology
Introduction
- Chapter 1 – Introducing sport psychology: discipline and profession
Part 1 Exploring athletic performance: key constructs
- Chapter 2 – Motivation and goal-setting in sport
- Chapter 3 – ‘’Psyching up’’ and calming down: anxiety in sport
- Chapter 4 – Emotions and coping
- Chapter 5 – Staying focused in sport: concentration in sport performers
- Chapter 6 – Using imagination in sport: mental imagery, motor imagery and mental
practice in athletes
- Chapter 7 – What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport
Part 2 Team cohesion
- Chapter 8 – Exploring team cohesion in sport: a critical perspective
Part 3 New directions in sport psychology
- Chapter 9 – New horizons: embodied cognition and cultural sport psychology
Important lecture slides and notes are incorporated in the corresponding chapters.
,Introduction
Chapter 1 – Introducing sport psychology: discipline and profession
Introduction
Although sport is played with the body, it is won in the mind.
Self-efficacy = the belief that one has the capacity to perform a given task and to achieve a specific
goal.
Mental toughness, confidence, and the ability to concentrate effectively are factors which distinguish
top athletes from less successful counterparts.
- The key to mental toughness is a level of self-belief that is robust and resilient in the face of
obstacles and setbacks.
Mental training is typically directed at avoiding performing losses --> focus on how you play and
ignore internal and external distractors.
Implications for mental practice:
- Mental practice for performance gains should focus on:
o Developing mental skills and enhancing sustainable motivation.
o Improving one’s expertise (level and consistency).
o Optimizing opportunities to develop and to train.
- Mental practice for performance losses should focus on:
o Enhancing the ability and motivation to effectively self-regulate during performance.
o Developing the competencies to utilize when performing.
o Optimizing the opportunities to perform well (e.g. materials, food, sleep).
The mental side of sport
There are four aspects of athletic performance:
- Physical --> fitness, strength and stamina which can be measured objectively.
- Technical --> the proficiency with which athletes can execute required fundamental skills.
- Tactical --> strategic aspects of athletic performance, like planning and decision making.
- Psychological/mental --> anxiety for example may lead to mistakes.
o Asking athletes what they have learned about mental factors that affect their
performance has two limitations:
It is hard to be unbiased when editing or analyzing interview data.
People see what they believe, rather than believe what they see.
, As athletes’ insights are invariably sport-specific, they are rather limited in
their generality of application.
Some sports are predictable (snooker), and some sports have
unknown variables (sailing with wind speed and direction).
What is confidence?
Confidence = the belief that one has the internal resources, particularly abilities, to achieve success.
- It is situation-specific --> a person may be more confident at the baseline than in volleying at
the net.
What is mental toughness? Meaning and measurement
Mental toughness = determination, resilience and/or an exceptional immunity to pressure situations.
- It enables athletes to react well to adversity and to persist in the face of setbacks.
Hardiness = a set of personality characteristics that enables people to mitigate the adverse effects of
stressful situations. Hardiness consists of:
- Control = the capacity to feel and act as if one could exert an influence in the situation.
- Challenge = the habit of perceiving potentially stressful situations as positive opportunities
rather than as threats.
- Commitment = stickability or the extent to which someone is likely to persist with a goal/task
4C’s model of mental toughness = hardiness (control, challenge, and commitment) + confidence.
- Confidence = a strong belief in one’s ability to complete a task successfully.
According to the 4C’s model, mentally tough athletes are people who have a high sense of self-belief
and an unshakeable faith that they can control their own destiny. They remain relatively unaffected
by competition or adversity.
Personal construct psychology = an approach that emphasizes the unique ways in which people
perceive and strive to make sense of their experience.
- Mental toughness comprised both general and specific components.
o General component --> having a natural or developed psychological edge to cope
better with competitive lifestyle and training demands than one’s rivals.
o Specific component --> the capacity to remain more determined, focused, confident
and in control than one’s rivals.
Four key dimensions of mental toughness:
- The attitudes and beliefs of the performer (mindset).
- Training (e.g., using long-term goals as motivation and pushing oneself to the limit).
- Competition (e.g., the ability to handle pressure).
- Post-competition (e.g., the ability to handle failure and setbacks).
To enhance mental toughness, coaches emphasize the importance of developing two characteristics
--> independence and resourcefulness (e.g., increasing self-awareness and encouraging reflection).
‘’Sports are 90% mental’’ --> agree or disagree.
- Disagree:
o If people lack the competence (do not have the fitness, strength, technical and
tactical skills required), the mental piece is completely irrelevant.
o People overestimate the impact of mental factors. Amateur athletes tend to explain
their inconsistency or lack of progress to mental factors (‘’It is between my ears’’).
, o Low-competent individuals typically perform inconsistently, also in low pressure
situations. So, competence rather than mental factors determine performance.
- Agree:
o When competing against an opponent of similar ability, mental factors make the
difference. Why? Mental factors are more sensitive to pressure situations than
physical, technical, and tactical factors.
o Mental factors determine athletes’ performance losses.
o Mental factors facilitate the development of expertise (i.e., performance gains).
The opportunity to perform is influenced by:
- Social support.
- Athlete support programs.
- Birthdate (the relative age effect) --> phenomenon by which children born early in the year
perform better than children born later in the same year.
- Birthplace.
Developing your critical thinking skills
Critical thinking = form of intelligent criticism which helps people to reach independent and
justifiable conclusions about their experiences.
Critical thinking comprises a motivational component and a cognitive component.
- Motivational --> adoption of open-mindedness, inquisitiveness, and skepticism.
- Cognitive --> analysis, evaluation, inference, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning.
Steps in critical thinking:
- Interpret the credibility of a source of information.
o ‘’What is the claim/conclusion that I am being asked to believe and who or what is
the source of that claim?’’
- Analyze a source.
o ‘’What type of evidence is used to support the claim(s)?’’
o Arguments generally fall into three camps --> fact, theory or faith.
- Evaluate the information.
o ‘’How valid is the evidence? What type of evidence would reject the claim?’’
o Establish the validity and reliability of the information.
- Use inference to establish whether there are alternative explanations for the evidence
provided.
- Explain the most likely conclusion based on available evidence.
- Consolidate what you know by establishing links between information (self-regulation).
Sport psychology as an academic discipline
Sport psychology = the application of psychological theory and methods to understand the
performance, mental processes and well-being of people who engage in sport.
Social facilitation = the capacity of rival performers to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.
