Sport Psychology Overview

Sport Psychology Recap

• Personality: Trait theory (Eysenck, 1967) suggests innate characteristics, stable and consistent behavior, especially under stress. Social learning theory (Bandura, 1971) emphasizes learned characteristics, with socialisation from primary and secondary groups, observation, identification, reinforcement and copying. Interactionist theory (Lewin, 1935) proposes behavior is a function of personality and situation (B=f(PxE)). Hollander's model (1971) uses questionnaires, interviews and observations to measure personality, including psychological core, typical responses, role-related behaviours and surface of personality.
• Credulous vs. Susceptible: Links to theories are either strong and trusted (credulous) or weak and doubted (susceptible).
• Attitudes: Thoughts and feelings about an attitude object, that can be positive or negative and are enduring.

Questionnaire Types

• Thurstone scale: Favourablility scale
• Likert scale: 5-point scale
• Osgood scale: Measure favourability

Anxiety

• State anxiety: Nervousness, irrational thinking, a negative effect on performance where the situation is potentially threatening. Somatic anxiety involves sweating and muscular tension, while cognitive anxiety entails thoughts and self-doubt.
• Competitive state anxiety: Sporting specific anxiety. Trait anxiety is a predisposition to nervousness, more common in sporting situations.
• Competitive trait anxiety: Constant anxiety, part of an individual's personality.

Arousal

• Inverted-U theory: Optimum arousal level exists, and performance drops off when above or below this level, depending on performance type and complexity of task.

Motivation

• Intrinsic motivation: Self-satisfaction and pride from completing a task. Driven by personal feelings.
• Extrinsic motivation: Comes from an external source, tangible (e.g., trophies) or intangible (e.g., praise).

Achievement Motivation

• Need to achieve: Welcomes competition and evaluation, demonstrating approach behaviours, confidence, leadership skills, and attributes success internally.
• Need to avoid failure: Avoids competition and evaluation, showing avoidance behaviours, insecurity, and attributes success externally.

Self-Serving Bias

• Using external and/or unstable explanations for losses (bad luck, task difficulty) and internal and/or stable explanations for wins (skill, ability). Everyone does this to some extent.

Cohesion

• Cohesion: The tendency/force for individuals to work together to achieve team goals.
• Task cohesion: Goal achievement and members working together.
• Social cohesion: Interaction between teammates and group harmony.

Social Facilitation and Inhibition

• Social facilitation: Performance enhancement through the presence of others.
• Social inhibition: Negative impact on performance due to the presence of others.

Reinforcement and Goal Setting

• Goal setting: Set goals that are achievable with effort, and players can gain satisfaction from achieving the goal. Outcome goals focus on results compared to performance-orientated goals that focus on improvement.
• Reinforcement: To motivate players, give praise and rewards for good performances

Attribution Theory

• Attribution: the reason given for something that has happened.
• Internal attribution: Result is due to the person's efforts and characteristics (e.g., ability or effort).
• External attribution: Result is due to factors outside the person's control (e.g., luck or task difficulty).
• Stable attribution: Reason is likely to persist in the future (e.g., ability).
• Unstable attribution: Reason is temporary or likely to change in the future (e.g., effort or luck).

Self-Serving Bias

• Self-serving bias: When winners attribute success to internal, stable factors (e.g., skill), whereas losers often blame external, unstable factors (e.g., bad luck or poor refereeing).

Learned Helplessness

• Learned helplessness: An internal stable attribution to failure.

Sport Confidence Model (Vealey, 1989)

• Trait sport confidence relates to a stable level of confidence and has innate characteristics
• State sport confidence refers to particular situations and is unstable and can be affected by things like competitive orientation.
• Objective competitive situation refers to games in the context of competitive sport
• Competitive orientation refers to a competitive trait and means how much effort is put into something.
• Model is useful to understand the way different personalities interact in sport environments.

Leadership in Sport

• Leadership is the drive and ability to motivate others to achieve goals and inspire effort.
• Types of leadership style:
• Autocratic: Leader dictates, makes decisions, demands obedience.
• Democratic: Involves seeking input and suggestions from the team before making decisions.
• Laissez-faire: Leader lets the group work on its own without much input.
• Essential characteristics of a leader: Assertive, confident, respectful, knowledgeable, passionate, empathetic, inspirational and organisational skills

Stress Management

• Cognitive Stress: Negative thoughts, feelings, loss of concentration and difficulty coping with the pressures of the situation.
• Somatic Stress: Physiological changes such as an increase in heart rate or sweating, and intense cases lead to nausea

Motivation

• Chelladurai's multi-dimensional model: Factors for leadership are the leader themselves, the group, and the situation in balance.
• Situational Characteristics: Task type (e.g., individual or team), amount of time, difficulty, and size.
• Leader Characteristics: Personality, skills, experience, style preferences, and motivational levels
• Member Characteristics: Gender, age, skill level, motivation, ambition level, and personality.