Summary sport and performance
psychology (Moran & Toner,
2017).
Chapter 1 - introduction
The mental side of sport
There´re four aspects of athletic performance:
Physical
o Fitness
o Strength
o Stamina
Technical
o Fundamental skills
Tactical
o Strategic aspects
Psychological
o Confidence
The belief that one has the internal resources, particularly abilities, to
achieve success
Is usually correlated positively with peak athletic performance
A lack of confidence is one of the problems most commonly reported by
athletes to sport psychologists
From Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy we discover that confidence is
essentially a belief, we can understand why it may vary significantly from one
context to another
Self-efficacy – the belief that one has the capacity to achieve a specific goal
Psychologists identified six key strategies to develop robust sport-confidence:
Logging evidence
Developing understanding and awareness
Manipulating the coaching environment
Tailoring interventions for the individual
Using psychological skills
Developing an athlete’s signature strengths
And four strategies to maintain robust sport-confidence:
Continuation of the development process
Influence the athlete’s environment
Stable beliefs
Reinforcing abilities
o Mental toughness
Hardiness – a constellation of personality characteristics that enables people
to mitigate the adverse effects of stressful situations
4C’s model of hardiness
o Control – the capacity to feel and act if one could exert an
influence in the situation in question.
1
, o Challenge – the habit of perceiving potentially stressful
situations as positive opportunities rather as threats
o Commitment – stick ability or the extent to which an
individual is likely to persist with a goal or work task
o Confidence – a strong belief in one’s ability to complete a
task successfully.
Mentally tough athletes are people who have a high sense of self-belief and
an unshakeable faith that they can control their own destiny and who can
remain relatively unaffected by competition or adversity
Mental toughness was perceived to be the most important determinant of
success in sport
Mental toughness is about performing well in high pressure situations (which
are not necessarily perceived as adverse), persisting when the going gets
tough, and retaining high levels of self-belief even after setbacks
Mental toughness is generally considered as an individual difference variable
consisting of multiple components which tent to help people to bounce back
from adversity
There is a little agreement about what the construct itself actually means or
about what theoretical mechanisms underlie it. Making sense of this
profusion of definitions of mental toughness (as well as other concepts) and
theories about how to develop it, requires you to develop and showcase a
critical understanding of relevant material
‘Sports are 90% mental’
Disagree
o If people lack the competence, that is, do not have the fitness, strength, technical
and tactical skills required, the mental piece is completely irrelevant
o People tend to overestimate the impact of mental factors
Agree
o When competing against an opponent of similar ability, mental skills determine if
athletes perform to their potential under pressure because mental factors are more
sensitive to pressure situations than physical, technical and tactical factors
o Mental skills facilitate the development of physical, technical and tactical skills
o Performance gains: actual performance = potential performance – performance
losses
Performance consists of:
Competence – the capacity to perform
o Skills
o Abilities
o Knowledge
Opportunity
o Social support
o Athlete support programs
o Birthdate (the relative age effect in selection of talents)
o Birthplace
The mind to perform
o Personality traits
2
, o Psychological skills and motivational orientations
Sample:
65 male pupils from Ajax, criterion of career success: have played for a professional soccer
team in an international competition for at least ten years a total of 18 players met this
criterion.
Predictor variables:
o Initial performance
o Goal commitment
o Problem-solving skills
o Seeking social support
Overall percentage correctly classified: 84,6%
There is evidence that more successful athletes display:
Higher levels of motivation
Command a wide range of mental skills (goal setting, anxiety control, imagery and self talk)
Higher levels of mental toughness and resilience, including
o Higher levels of confidence and perceived control
o Better ability to cope with adversity (problem solving and social support)
o Greater resistance to choking
Conclusion:
Mental skills are a critical part of the high performance package; its impact differs across
sports, individuals, situations and moments
Similar to any other skills, mental skills should be learned (implicitly) and practiced; there are
typically no quick fix solutions
Mental skills are widely acknowledged to drive success, but in training practice, often ignored
Apart from its inaccuracy, Yogi Berra’s statement (baseball is 90 percent mental and the other
half is physical) makes no sense; body and mind are united rather than distinct.
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 are involved in sport.
Sport psychology is commonly regarded as in applied science. Sport psychologist have a lot of
research methods:
Grounded theory
Descriptive search
Case study
Naturalistic observation
Survey research
Psychometric testing
Correlational research
Experimental research
Single-case research
Sport psychology as a profession
What type of work do sport psychologist actually do?
3
, Applied consultancy work
Education
Research
Current status of sport psychology: respect of scepticism?
In spite of its struggle against certain persistent criticisms and misconceptions, sport psychology is
making encouraging progress in establishing itself as a respected discipline.
Chapter 2 – motivation and goal-setting
Motivation
Motivation – the psychological forces that determine the direction of a person’s behaviour, a person’s
level of intensity or effort, and a person’s level of persistence.
There’re three types of motivation:
Intrinsic motivation
o Refers to people’s impetus to perform an activity for its own sake
o The behaviour is experienced as inherently satisfying, because it satisfies the basic
needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness (SDT), the natural ingredients for
intrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation
o The activity is perceived as a means to a separable outcome
o Whenever a person is involved in a task largely as a result of external factors or
constraints
Amotivation
o The absence of motivation
There’re different approaches to the construct of motivation in sport psychology. There is a
personality approach, epitomized by research on individual differences in people’s need for
achievement. And there’re three social-cognitive models:
Achievement goal theory
o Achievement behaviour – behaviour directed at developing or demonstrating high
rather than low competence
o This theory seeks to understand people’s adaptive and maladaptive responses to
achievement challenges
o Two main types of goals:
Task or mastery goals
Athletes with a task or mastery goal orientation define competence
and success in self-referenced term such as personal improvement
and development
Research has shown that a task or mastery goal orientation is
associated with more desirable outcomes than an ego or
performance goal orientation, including intrinsic motivation,
agreeableness and sportsmanship.
Mastery approach – ‘’I want to learn as much as possible from this
group coaching session’’ (striving to learn or improve skills)
Mastery avoidance – ‘’ I’m concerned that I may not learn what I
need to learn in this session’’ (striving to avoid learning failures or a
decline in skills)
4
psychology (Moran & Toner,
2017).
Chapter 1 - introduction
The mental side of sport
There´re four aspects of athletic performance:
Physical
o Fitness
o Strength
o Stamina
Technical
o Fundamental skills
Tactical
o Strategic aspects
Psychological
o Confidence
The belief that one has the internal resources, particularly abilities, to
achieve success
Is usually correlated positively with peak athletic performance
A lack of confidence is one of the problems most commonly reported by
athletes to sport psychologists
From Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy we discover that confidence is
essentially a belief, we can understand why it may vary significantly from one
context to another
Self-efficacy – the belief that one has the capacity to achieve a specific goal
Psychologists identified six key strategies to develop robust sport-confidence:
Logging evidence
Developing understanding and awareness
Manipulating the coaching environment
Tailoring interventions for the individual
Using psychological skills
Developing an athlete’s signature strengths
And four strategies to maintain robust sport-confidence:
Continuation of the development process
Influence the athlete’s environment
Stable beliefs
Reinforcing abilities
o Mental toughness
Hardiness – a constellation of personality characteristics that enables people
to mitigate the adverse effects of stressful situations
4C’s model of hardiness
o Control – the capacity to feel and act if one could exert an
influence in the situation in question.
1
, o Challenge – the habit of perceiving potentially stressful
situations as positive opportunities rather as threats
o Commitment – stick ability or the extent to which an
individual is likely to persist with a goal or work task
o Confidence – a strong belief in one’s ability to complete a
task successfully.
Mentally tough athletes are people who have a high sense of self-belief and
an unshakeable faith that they can control their own destiny and who can
remain relatively unaffected by competition or adversity
Mental toughness was perceived to be the most important determinant of
success in sport
Mental toughness is about performing well in high pressure situations (which
are not necessarily perceived as adverse), persisting when the going gets
tough, and retaining high levels of self-belief even after setbacks
Mental toughness is generally considered as an individual difference variable
consisting of multiple components which tent to help people to bounce back
from adversity
There is a little agreement about what the construct itself actually means or
about what theoretical mechanisms underlie it. Making sense of this
profusion of definitions of mental toughness (as well as other concepts) and
theories about how to develop it, requires you to develop and showcase a
critical understanding of relevant material
‘Sports are 90% mental’
Disagree
o If people lack the competence, that is, do not have the fitness, strength, technical
and tactical skills required, the mental piece is completely irrelevant
o People tend to overestimate the impact of mental factors
Agree
o When competing against an opponent of similar ability, mental skills determine if
athletes perform to their potential under pressure because mental factors are more
sensitive to pressure situations than physical, technical and tactical factors
o Mental skills facilitate the development of physical, technical and tactical skills
o Performance gains: actual performance = potential performance – performance
losses
Performance consists of:
Competence – the capacity to perform
o Skills
o Abilities
o Knowledge
Opportunity
o Social support
o Athlete support programs
o Birthdate (the relative age effect in selection of talents)
o Birthplace
The mind to perform
o Personality traits
2
, o Psychological skills and motivational orientations
Sample:
65 male pupils from Ajax, criterion of career success: have played for a professional soccer
team in an international competition for at least ten years a total of 18 players met this
criterion.
Predictor variables:
o Initial performance
o Goal commitment
o Problem-solving skills
o Seeking social support
Overall percentage correctly classified: 84,6%
There is evidence that more successful athletes display:
Higher levels of motivation
Command a wide range of mental skills (goal setting, anxiety control, imagery and self talk)
Higher levels of mental toughness and resilience, including
o Higher levels of confidence and perceived control
o Better ability to cope with adversity (problem solving and social support)
o Greater resistance to choking
Conclusion:
Mental skills are a critical part of the high performance package; its impact differs across
sports, individuals, situations and moments
Similar to any other skills, mental skills should be learned (implicitly) and practiced; there are
typically no quick fix solutions
Mental skills are widely acknowledged to drive success, but in training practice, often ignored
Apart from its inaccuracy, Yogi Berra’s statement (baseball is 90 percent mental and the other
half is physical) makes no sense; body and mind are united rather than distinct.
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 are involved in sport.
Sport psychology is commonly regarded as in applied science. Sport psychologist have a lot of
research methods:
Grounded theory
Descriptive search
Case study
Naturalistic observation
Survey research
Psychometric testing
Correlational research
Experimental research
Single-case research
Sport psychology as a profession
What type of work do sport psychologist actually do?
3
, Applied consultancy work
Education
Research
Current status of sport psychology: respect of scepticism?
In spite of its struggle against certain persistent criticisms and misconceptions, sport psychology is
making encouraging progress in establishing itself as a respected discipline.
Chapter 2 – motivation and goal-setting
Motivation
Motivation – the psychological forces that determine the direction of a person’s behaviour, a person’s
level of intensity or effort, and a person’s level of persistence.
There’re three types of motivation:
Intrinsic motivation
o Refers to people’s impetus to perform an activity for its own sake
o The behaviour is experienced as inherently satisfying, because it satisfies the basic
needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness (SDT), the natural ingredients for
intrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation
o The activity is perceived as a means to a separable outcome
o Whenever a person is involved in a task largely as a result of external factors or
constraints
Amotivation
o The absence of motivation
There’re different approaches to the construct of motivation in sport psychology. There is a
personality approach, epitomized by research on individual differences in people’s need for
achievement. And there’re three social-cognitive models:
Achievement goal theory
o Achievement behaviour – behaviour directed at developing or demonstrating high
rather than low competence
o This theory seeks to understand people’s adaptive and maladaptive responses to
achievement challenges
o Two main types of goals:
Task or mastery goals
Athletes with a task or mastery goal orientation define competence
and success in self-referenced term such as personal improvement
and development
Research has shown that a task or mastery goal orientation is
associated with more desirable outcomes than an ego or
performance goal orientation, including intrinsic motivation,
agreeableness and sportsmanship.
Mastery approach – ‘’I want to learn as much as possible from this
group coaching session’’ (striving to learn or improve skills)
Mastery avoidance – ‘’ I’m concerned that I may not learn what I
need to learn in this session’’ (striving to avoid learning failures or a
decline in skills)
4
