Summary Current Topics: Introduction to Sport and Performance Psychology

A snapshot of the summary - Current Topics: Introduction to Sport and Performance Psychology

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• What is the definition of sport psychology?

  Sport psychology is the scientific study of people and their behaviors in sport and exercise contexts and the practical application of that knowledge.
• What are the objectives of sport psychology?

  • The objectives of sport psychology have roughly two components;
    
  • Psychological factors; everything we already know about psychology.
  • Physical and motor performance;
    
  • the two objective tracts sport psychology contains are;
  • the influence of psychological factors on Physical and motor performance.
  • the influence of Physical and motor performance on psychological factors
• What is the definition of performance psychology?

  Performance psychology is the study that investigates psychological factors as a starting point to understand human performance where performance is defined as achieving goals.
• What is a goal?

  Something a person is consciously and deliberately trying to accomplish
• In what ways do goals increase performance?

  goals cause
  

  • Directing attention
    
  • helps focussing attention on what is necessary to achieve the goal.
  • regulating effort
  • energy is a limited resource. When a goal is set we can determine how much time and effort we need to spend on different components in orter to achieve the goal.
  • prolonging persistence
  • having a measurable goal causes us to have measurable progress, which can be a motivating factor to continue.
  • developing new strategies
  • thinking about a goal enables one to determine strategies specifically to achieve that goal instead of simply using a more general, less efficient strategy
• Name an example of a neuroscientific research within sport psychology.

  • Swimmers we're looking at videos of their own failures while being recorded in an fMRI scanner.
    
  • after watching the video, researchers tried to identify changes in regional cerebral activity associated with negative affect after viewing a video of a personal competitive failure
  • also, the swimmers received a short corgnitive intervention before watching the video in the scanner again, to see if there're any neural correlates from this.
  • sadness ratings were recorded after watching the videos both times.
  • the results were that the swimmers were less sad after the cognitive intervention, (could be confounded by repeated viewing.)
• Describe a research cycle

  • Propose a research question
  • reformulate into a hypothesis
  • Choose a research method
    
  • collect data
  • analyze data
  • develop a theory.
• How do we call an organized set of principles used to explain observed phenomena

  A theory
• What is the difference between experiments and quasi-experiments?

  • In an experiment the researcher controls the environment and manipulates one or multiple independent variables.
    
  • in a quasi-experiment the researcher doesn't manipulate variables because the variability is naturally occurring; for example gender, age, etc.
• What is internal and external validity?

  • internal validity is The extent to which differences between the intervention and control groups in a clinical study can be confidently attributed to the intervention and not to an alternative explanation, which requires reducing confounding factors and bias to a minimum.
  • external validity is the extent to which study findings can be generalized beyond the sample used in the study.