Sports psychology

Sports Psychology

LO1 - Demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of the theoretical underpinning of psychology in sports performance.

In this first learning outcome I will be discussing what psychology is and how this, in turn is related to sports psychology. What is psychology? “Psychology is the science of the nature, functions, and phenomena of behaviour and mental experience” Colman(1999).

Colman suggests that psychology isn't just a study of the science of behaviour and that psychology holds more depth around other areas such as nature, functions and mental experience. Psychology is very hard to define which is why there are various different opinions on how people perceive  psychology to be.

The next question I asked myself is how do areas within sports psychology effect sports performers?

Firstly I will discuss what I believe sports psychology to be and what it means.

"Sports psychology is the study of how psychology influences sports, athletic performance, exercise and physical activity." Cherry(2013)

Sports psychology was first used in 1920 in a laboratory in Berlin but was widely misunderstood and later closed in 1932 due to lack of funds. Sports psychology didn't make a reappearance until the 1960's and has been ever-present since then and is now used in all sports across the world.

There are however main areas within sports psychology which are focused on more than others, these are; motivation, personality, anxiety, stress and arousal.

Personality

Personality is an important aspect of sports psychology due to the emerging influx of sports psychology within sport. Kalat (1999) in Cox(2012) states that personality is "all the consistent ways in which the behaviour of one person differs from that of others, especially in social situations"

Within personality there are two main subdivisions which are states and traits.

The following quote by Karageorghis sums up a personality trait by saying "a personality trait is a generic factor that causes a person to behave in a certain way across situations".  A trait is how you would always react based on previous experiences within your life whether this be right or wrong this is how you believe you should handle the situation. A good trait personality theory I will be discussing further is Eysenck's theory pictured below.

Trait approach

Hans Eysenck created this theory to try to categorize people in to 4 areas; these being unstable, stable, introvert and extrovert. Eysenck believed that people would fit in to these 4 categories for everything within their lives. His later research however proved that this wouldn't be the case as he realised that people can be totally different from a social aspect to a sports related environment. 

Macdonald(1995) however argued that Eysenck's model didn't allow for the variety of ways people can navigate a social environment. He went on to say that people had different levels of personality traits that reflect different ways people react to situations. 

State approach

Banduras social learning theory which focuses on the state approach meaning people form their behaviours down to experiences as appose to inheritable from parents. Bandura quoted this within his social learning theory book "most human behaviour is learned observationally through modelling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviours are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action"

The state approach is based on someone developing their behaviour based upon; experiences, role models, observation and social reinforcement. Experience can mould someones behaviour by believing what they have seen should be replicated in future and when this situation arises they may replicate the experiences from previous. Role models can be a massive influence on behaviour of someone, they look up to these people for a long period of time and this relates directly to how they behave. A good example of this would be a football player approaching a referee in an aggressive behaviour, this can be perceived as acceptable and used in future generations.. Observation is linked in to both previous experiences and role models which can also be a big influence on how someone behaves.  Finally social reinforcement, this is key to someone repeating something. If you don't know whether to repeat something and someone actively tells you what you are doing is right you are more likely to repeat this, for e.g. when taking a penalty in football you miss the shot but the technique you used was perfect. If a coach was to say "excellent technique" you are more likely to want to replicate the technique with a better outcome the next time.

Interactional approach

The theories on state, trait and the interactional theory are all formed on the basis that comes from the structure of personality. A great way of showing the structure is using Hollanders(1967) theory as shown below.

The way this model works is as follows; the psychological core is whats known as the 'real you'. All the private information you wouldn't reveal when asked questions on them. This would also be a persons values, beliefs and the areas which are most difficult for a person to change. Then there is the typical responses, these really reflect on our beliefs, values and how our previous experiences help to guide us with decisions. These responses often have a massive indication of the nature of our psychological core. Our final perceived area of our psychological structure is known as the role related behaviour. This is the most superficial area of our structure. We change our behaviour in order to fit the situations we find ourselves in and this is how our role related behaviour helps our actions during these situations. We shouldn't be judged on our role related behaviour as this is a poor indicator on our psychological core therefore we could be reacting to a situation which may not be fully in line with beliefs and values we hold.

Motivation

What is motivation? "Motivation is the process that initiates, guides and maintains goal-oriented behaviours" Cherry(2013)
Motivation is defined by two categories; these being intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation in relation to psychology is defined as "the absence of any external factors such as extrinsic rewards" Cameron(2006) which shows that if you were to do a sport for any of the following reasons this would be classed as intrinsic motivation; enjoyment, winning and for better health. Whereas extrinsic motivation is defined as "engaging in activities for instrumental reasons" Otis et al(2005). Extrinsic motivation is better known as things that drive people external to the sport they are doing such as; money, trophies, parents and coaches.

What is achievement motivation?
Achievement motivation is the feeling within someone to want to better themselves to the highest possible standard. Gill (1986) " A person who has high levels of achievement motivation would
have a tendency to strive for success, persist in the face of failure and
experience pride in accomplishments"
Often people who fit this category have the following personality traits; persistence, determination and competitiveness. These three personality traits allow for people with achievement motivation to be able to strive to the highest areas within sport whether this be national or international standard.

Why is competitiveness the key to motivation?
I believe that both competition and motivation go hand in hand together. I believe this because without competition what is the reason to be motivated?. Everyone motivates themselves to do something whether that be for health reasons, sports related etc.As you can see from the graph below this is how situational factors and personal factors can help determine competitive behaviour.

 Garcia(2013) states that the concerns over comparison between someone and competitors along with personal and individual factors can increase competitive behaviour. I agree with Garcia as for e.g. if a player was to go on trial at a football club, they would immediately feel pressure amongst other competitors and this coupled with comparisons made by coaches can in my opinion automatically raise the competitive nature of a persons behaviour.

What is achievement situation and how does it affect sports performance? Achievement situation is something where the performer is putting themselves in a situation which involves evaluation.  Heckhausen(1991) "Fear of failure may be construed as a self-evaluative framework that influences how the individual defines, orients to, and experiences failure in achievement situations". Achievement situation can effect the performance of a performer in circumstances that don't involve the performer being evaluated, this would obviously have an effect on the performers arousal level towards the event which would likely effect overall performance level.

The need to achieve - People who are said to have the need to achieve are people that set themselves moderately difficult but achievable goals, they are determined to succeed but don't want to make a task to easy to undermine their skill level. David McCllelland devised a test to test how people behaved when set a task to differentiate the need to achieve from the need to avoid failure, this task was as follows "participants were asked to throw rings over a peg from any distance they choose. Most people tended to throw at random-now close. now far away; but individuals with a high need for achievement seemed to carefully measure where they were most likely to get a sense of mastery". This shows that those with a need to achieve like to challenge themselves but also they believe by doing this they will have a higher chance of succeeding

The need to avoid failure - This is also known as "the capacity to experience shame in failure"Gill(2000) As the name would suggest this is how some people feel they need to avoid failure at all costs as appose to wanting to achieve success. Often this type of person only wants to enter competition they feel they will have a good chance of winning. Referring this to a sports situation would be a rock climber who devises the easiest way up a mountain to avoid any challenges.

Interactional theory

As you can see from the above diagram was created by McClelland and Atkinson(1976) this is the NAC(need to achieve) Vs the NAF(need to avoid failure). I believe this diagram to be a very good indicator of how personality and situational factors can influence and tend to be the outcome of your motivation. This is a difference often seen between athletes and non athletes due to the desire and motivation need to achieve at the highest level athletes must always push and not settle for second best if they are to reach the professional level.

The final area of motivation I will be discussing is Weiners theory of attribution, the theory is used as a way for people to account for success and failure. Weiner believes there are three main areas within his theory of attribution, these being the locus of causality, locus of control and stability.The locus of causality is how you attribute the cause whether this be internal or external, as you can see from the diagram above created by Weiner(1986). For e.g. in relation to a sporting performance in a particular game if you perform poorly then you either attribute this failure to internal reasons which are; ability and effort or external reasons such as; task difficulty or luck. One of the other categories being stability determines whether or not the reason you believe you succeeded or failed was either a stable or unstable factor. A stable factor is something that is rarely changed such as from the previous attribute ability and the difficulty of a task. Difficulty of a task isn't necessarily stable however because its outside our control this come within the stable section. The unstable factors such as effort and luck are both more easily changed/unreliable,this is because luck isn't dependable and effort can be adjusted in particular situations. Finally there is the locus of control, this very much depends one whether a certain situation is either in your control or not. A good sporting example of this would be a penalty kick for the opposing team in football when you are a striker. With this being out of your control their is nothing you can do to effect the situation. whereas if you were in control of the penalty then this situation is then totally within your control. This is then possible for someone to attribute either failure or success to this situation for e.g. "we lost the game because I missed the penalty". 

Arousal

L.O2, Demonstrate knowledge of the main methods of enquiry in arousal   and its effects on sports performance.

Next area for discussion will be arousal. Arousal can also be a key to whether a performer has a successful contribution towards a game or not. what is arousal and how does it effect the performers?Gadsdon(1991) explains that "Arousal can be said to be our state of activation, ranging on a continuum, from deep sleep to extreme excitation". Obviously in a game situation your arousal levels wont be constant throughout, these depend on situations that arise during the game. For e.g. if you score a goal for your time the arousal levels will probably rise for a period of time before lowering again. The first theory I will be discussing is Hulls drive theory.

Drive theory - Hull(1943) discovered that there is a natural linear relationship between the degree of arousal and the quality of someones performance.This was the first known arousal theory and Clarke Hull believed the most aroused players would perform the best which as research continued turned out to be false which is when Yerkes and Dodson law took over as the leading theory for arousal. Also this is only half true for another reason, this is because as an expert in a sport having higher arousal is likely to increase performance as you can perform on habitual responses. Whereas beginners are proved that the higher the arousal level because they are not experienced within the sport, the likelihood is that the performance will deteriorate.

The second of the theories I will be discussing is known as the 'inverted u' theory or Yerkes-Dodson law and this is pictured below.

As you can see with this inverted u theory there is an area for optimal performance which coincides with the optimally aroused area in the middle. As you can see on either side of the graph both under and over aroused will often mean poor performance.

This graph works for a lot of team sports such as football, rugby and ice hockey, however if you was to try and use this method towards alot of individual sports such as darts, snooker or boxing then this graph would be inappropriate. For e.g. in a game of snooker very little arousal level is needed due to the fine movements needed for playing this sport. Yerkes-Dodson also said there was 4 more things that influence whether this graph is effective or not, these are; skill level, personality, trait anxiety and task complexity. I will explain what I feel each term means below;

Skill level - if someone feels they are under trained in a certain skill they will feel more under pressure which in turn causes poorer performance because they have less well rehearsed responses to fall back on.

Personality - personality can also affect how a player performs and Yerkes-Dodson suggest that extroverts are better equipped to perform under high pressured situations whereas introverts would often succumb to the pressure.

Trait anxiety - if someone is naturally an anxious person then they will often lose focus which produces worse performances in a sporting environment. Whereas someone who is naturally confident are more likely to thrive under more amounts of pressure.

Task complexity - depending on the difficulty of the task it can really affect a players excitement levels towards a game dependent upon their personality, if they are an extrovert they are more likely to relish the challenge as appose to an introvert who would be wary of difficult challenges.

Anxiety

The next area I will discuss is an area of psychology which includes the multidimensional theory of anxiety.

Anxiety can be very detrimental to a sports performer who cannot handle the pressures that comes with the sport they perform in and can ultimately cause their downfall if they don’t learn how to process their mind to thinking differently about certain situations. For e.g. an inexperienced sports performer plays in a cup final for the first time, if they struggle with containing their anxiety then it would more than likely have an outcome of a poor individual performance.

In the video below between 0.19 and 0.51 seconds, it really explains exactly how state and trait anxiety work and shows that state anxiety is very much a response to a situation you have to deal with as appose to trait anxiety which is within your personality.

The diagram below is a multidimensional graph I really think shows how anxiety effects someone in different ways, for e.g. this shows that it is possible to have a mixture of anxiety such as cognitive state anxiety or somatic trait anxiety. 

There has however been criticisms of this theory as recent as Krane(1992) who states "Researchers have continued to examine cognitive and somatic anxiety independently of one an other. That is, the relationship between cognitive anxiety and performance has been examined separately from the relationship between somatic anxiety and performance, disregarding the multivariate nature of the multidimensional anxiety theory" she goes on to say that the multidimensional theory fails to recognise that both somatic and cognitive anxiety can also interact as appose to being separate components 

 Aggression

Another area of sports psychology I will be discussing is aggression and I will be talking about another theory called the frustration aggression theory. Aggression can be used both positively and negatively within sport and sometimes a positively based aggression type game can be the difference between winning and losing. A good e.g. of positively used aggression is the way the new zealand use their war cry to try and intimidate their opponent before each game.

 

The diagram below shows how this theory works, Berkowitz(1969) who created this diagram believes that "being frustrated heightens ones predisposition towards violent actions. Contextual factors come in to play and how an individual interprets the situation cues at hand best predicts whether this athlete will exhibit aggression."

Berkowitz also goes on to suggest that sport related cues such as; people associated with aggressive acts, contact sports, objects associated with aggression(bats etc) and places associated with violence in previous occasions are more likely to increase aggression. 

Stress

LO3, Communicate effectively information and arguments on the theories of stress and apply the theories to optimising sports performance.

Firstly to discuss what stress is and how it can have both positive and negative effects on someone dependent on their personality and also the stressor involved. The definition of stress as follows, "a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances"(oxford dictionary). This is exactly what effects sports performers both emotional and physical stress brought about by competition whether this be through difficulty of the competition of the severity a competition can impact stress upon the body. Adversely stress can alert the body to an impending competition and can increase the performance by the rise of arousal and motivation levels. This quote by Rory Mcllroy typifies this “You’re always going to be nervous teeing it up in a Major Championship. It’s very natural and it’s a good thing. It means that you want it.”. 

As you can see from the above diagram created by Folkman(1982) called the transactional model of stress and coping, the performer is the inner wall within the diagram. As you can see along the row in the middle that's how a person identifies a problem, whether that be from previous memory, perception etc. The potential stressor sits within the environment category and when there is a provoked stress for e.g. an impending world cup in football and the chance of being chosen for the squad this will no doubt impact a feeling of distress on the performer. Constraints often vary between whether the problem is within your own problem or not, for e.g.Folkman suggested that "in situations where people perceive that something can be done, they will be more likely to adopt problem-solving or behavioural strategies aimed at altering or managing the source of stress. In situations where people perceive nothing can be done or they feel it necessary to hold back from acting, they will direct cognitive and behavioural effort toward reducing or managing their own distress". This shows people can use different coping mechanisms dependent on whether they feel the problem is solvable or not from an internal view, in relation to the previous world cup comparison this would be out of the persons control so referring to the constraints view the person would try to use their cognitive and behaviour to minimise distress. 

The next theory as seen below was created by Reilly and Williams(2003) 

As you can see from the above diagram there are 4 key stages to this theory. Stage 1 is very much dependent on the environment and whether the demand is physiological or psychological. Stage 2 is how the performer perceives the environmental demand that is placed on them and finally stage 4 is the behaviour, also known as the outcome or response to the previous 3 stages. Using the same example as the previous theory as to make comparison I will see how this theory effects a performer. A performer going to the world cup would have both a psychological and physiological demand placed upon them however they would also identify how much threat they perceive the world cup to have on them. 

Conclusion

After researching motivation, arousal and stress its clear to see that in more than one way they all link together. When talking about motivation and how this effects performers you can see an obvious link to arousal, this is because to be motivated for something there has to be an arousal or a sense of excitement to want to do this, however they can also be very different when related to some sports to. For e.g. in a snooker match the performers will likely to be highly motivated but must be very low along the arousal continuum because this is a fine movement game and arousal would more than likely effect shot placement and also thought process. When comparing stress to motivation there is a link that the performer is motivated to correct any stressor that may be placed upon them, whether this by via an internal or external cause there will be high motivation to correct the stressor. The link between stress and arousal can also be linked very closely due to the arousal to try and correct the stressor, for e.g. in the Olympics during trials for the national squads there is a high stress places upon the performers to perform highly in order for them to qualify, however the performers will be extremely highly aroused in order want to qualify. This isn't always true although, Usain Bolt the 100 metre world champion seems to be less aroused at the start of an Olympics as he is so confident of success and it almost seems to easy for him. Referring back to an example used within the stress theory the world cup would most likely link all three motivation, arousal and stress to a performer as they would be experiencing a vast amount of emotional and physiological feelings during this time which would in affect cause high arousal and motivation but also a high stress level due to the pressures that will be placed on them.

Luke Jackson

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