Lecture 1: Course introduction
- Understand and describe the underlying conceptual framework of this course: the
‘X-model for sport behavior’.
1. Sport situation:
o Task demands: what kind of task
o Task circumstances: environment
o Task conditions: regels, belonging, time
o Task relations: team/alone, coach & athlete
2. Person/athlete:
o Psychophysiological state
Stable characteristics: physical, technical, psychological, tactical
Unstable characteristics: current capacity, state anxiety, and goal state
o KSAO’s: knowledge, skills, abilities, others
Actual: what the athlete has
Required: what is required
3. Sport behavior:
o Motivation: willingness to spend effort
o Action plan: strategy and tactical plan
4. Sport outcomes:
o Performance: objective and subjective
o Result: translation of performance in points
Results may differ per performance, depending on the performance of others.
5. Person/athlete outcomes:
o Psychological state (positive or negative)
- Explain how action theory can be used to understand sport behavior.
, o Box 1 (sport situation) + box 2 (person/athlete) -> determines action plan,
strategy and tactical plan.
o Movement behavior: execution of the task
o Action theory: divide a skill in different components and order it
hierarchically. For example when you look at soccer playing, you make a
difference in defensive actions, attacks and shooting. So you can analyze it.
Lecture 2: Attention, anxiety and performance
- Describe the construct of choking under pressure, arousal, anxiety and attentional control
o Choking under pressure:
Chocking in sport is a process whereby the individual perceives that his/her
resources are insufficient to meet the demands of the situation, and concludes with a
significant drop in performance, a choke.
This mostly happens in situations that are personally important.
Preventive measures for choking should reduce worries and enforce positive
monitoring (positive form of internal attention)
o Arousal:
Arousal is a general physiological and psychological activation, varying on a
continuum from deep sleep to intense excitement.
Sporters need to be in a functional state of alertness.
It is connected with stress: you think is this a challenge or a threat?
o Anxiety:
Anxiety is a negative emotional state in which feelings of nervousness, worry and
apprehension are associated with activation or arousal of the body.
This is negative and subjective.
2 components:
1. Cognitive anxiety: thought process
2. Somatic anxiety: physical response
o Attentional control:
All cognitive processes responsible for increasing or decreasing the activation level of
internal or external representations.
Attentional control theory: anxiety causes an imbalance in the attentional system in
favor of the bottom-up system/environment (compared to top-down, goals)
- Explain the main explanatory theories/models on the relationship between arousal,
anxiety and performance
o Drive theory:
, More arousal leads to better performance. This is feasible when you have a simple
task.
o Inverted-U hypothesis:
There is an optimal point of arousal. When this is passed, the performance will drop.
Too simplistic: There need to be a different graph for simple and difficult tasks.
o Individualized zones of optimal functioning model:
Top athletes have a zone of optimal state anxiety where their performance occurs.
This is not always in the midpoint. Can be task-independent.
o Catastrophe theory:
Arousal and performance will increase until a certain threshold. When arousal is too
high, performance will drop. Also the recovery takes longer.
o Reversal theory:
The effect of the arousal on performance is dependent on how the performer
perceives this arousal. When arousal is high the perception will determine if this is
excitement or anxiety. When arousal is low the perception will determine if it is
relaxation or boredom.
- Understand the role of attentional control within the arousal, anxiety and performance
relationship, as explained from 2 different perspectives: distraction vs. self-focus theories
o Distraction theory:
Skill failure is a consequence of overloaded working memory.
Pressure creates a distracting environment. (because anxiety causes an imbalance in
attentional system in favor of the bottom-up system: stimulus-driven attention) This
leads to an attention shift towards task-irrelevant cues: you become worrying about
the situation and the importance of the outcome. This leads to more consuming of
the working memory. This leads to 2 competing demands: the task himself vs dealing
with the worries.
o Self-focus theories: Explicit attention to a task is thought to disrupt well learned or
proceduralized performance.
Explicit monitoring theory: high pressure leads to high anxiety, leads to more
self-focus, which makes that you are more conscious thinking about your
automatic movements. This leads to less well performance and skill
execution.
Theory of reinvestment: When there is high pressure, this can lead to
thinking about knowledge that you acquired earlier in learning, because you
want to control your automatic movements. This can lead to impaired
performance.
So in distraction theories, pressure shifts attention away from
execution. In self-focus theories, pressure shifts too much attention
to skill execution process.
