Study: Self Talk: Review and Sport Specific Model

Abstract:

 Self-talk is a key component of the sport psychology canon. Although self-talk has been widely endorsed by athletes and coaches as a performance enhancement strategy, a comprehensive model of self-talk in sport that might be used to guide systematic research has yet to be developed. This purpose of this paper is to: (a) review theory and research related to self-talk in sport; and (b) present a sport-specific model that builds upon existing theory and research, and addresses key questions related to self-talk. The paper begins with a definition of self-talk, developed with consideration of the discursive nature of inner speech and dual process theories. Extant self-talk models related to self-talk in sport are reviewed and serve as a foundation for a sport-specific model of self-talk. Components of the model (i.e., self-talk, System 1, System 2, behaviour, contextual factors, personal factors) are presented, the reciprocal relationships among model components are explored, and implications of the sport-specific model of self-talk are discussed.

Author:

Judy L. Van Raalte, PhD, is a certified consultant for the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) and listed in the United States Olympic Committee Sport Psychology Registry. She has presented at conferences in 18 countries and published over 90 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, the NCAA, and the International Tennis Federation. Van Raalte served as president of the American Psychological Association's Society of Sport, Exercise & Performance Psychology (APA Division 47) and vice president of the International Society of Sport Psychology. She is a fellow of APA and AASP.

Research Interests

• Self-talk
• Body image
• Professional issues in sport and exercise psychology

Links:

http://springfield.edu/directory/judy-l-van-raalte

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1469029215000874

Quotes:

"If we already know everything that we know, then why would we talk to ourselves?"

"When you ask people after the fact, they tend to be pretty poor at remembering what they were thinking, or what their experiences were."

"So people who think they are not really great, and say I'm not really great, and then are told to think 'No your awesome', sometimes get stuck in thinking and actually feel worse, and up performing worse."

"You don't have to act on every thought you have.  It just might be part of the process and normal because sport can be frustrating."

"How much self-talk is too much?"

"So what I think is new is looking at all the relationships between these factors and then opening things up to really consider peoples own private experiences with system one self talk."

Practitioner: Donald Christensen

Don grew up playing golf with his family, and began to play more competitively as time went on. In high school he won four state titles in Washington State. His skills helped him get a scholarship to play golf at Stanford University (pre-Tiger he added in). He cites being exposed to some mental coaching as youngster (i.e. reading The Inner Game of Tennis) as the spark the interest that would influence his career choice.

After finishing at Stanford Don attended the University of Washington where he obtained his PHD in Clinical Psychology. During his time at UW and following Don worked with various athletic teams at the school and teams in the community. He currently works for Shoreline Community College, where he has been a professor of psychology since 2004. Additionally he works part time as a consultant for athletes in the local Seattle area.

Links:

Author: https://www.shoreline.edu/dchris/donchris/

Quotes:

"What I typically tell people is, if you wanted to have six pack abs could you do that in a day? Unless you are going to a plastic surgeon, that's not going to happen. The same thing is true with mental skills…if you devote the right effort over a sustained period of time, they grow and they change."

"Mental skills are very much like physical muscles, if you train them properly they will change."

"By their nature, habits kind of, at least initially, operate outside of our awareness. So with this mental work…you are hopefully bringing awareness to those habits and modifying them to allow them to serve you."

"The first stage is control by others, the second stage is control by yourself, and then the last stage is automatic."

"The argument is the best execution of those actions comes when you move into the final stage and it's automatic."

"If you are relying upon reminders to yourself to do something, particularly when pressure comes it's not a recipe for successful behavior. It's not a recipe for high performance, in fact you will probably underperform."

"I like the notion of a sports psychologist as a facilitator as opposed to expert. I mean ya, we have some training and some knowledge that people may not have, but I like this idea of people becoming their own coach."

"I usually joke with athlete, I tell them that I hope you mess up majorly while you work with me because what we will do in the aftermath is we will review it."

"When we fail, when we struggle, when things don't go well, we often don't want to revisit those moments."

"What if it's not failure, what if it's feedback?"

"When we get excessively anxious, we are actually impairing the pre-frontal cortex. You can actually see it being inhibited, and that's one major piece of the brain we are going to rely upon to that kind of mental talk yourself through it work. So we are handicapping the very part of our nervous system that we would need to be able to use to pull off that kind of execution. I think better to learn that skill beyond that, so that again its automatic, it's habitual. Such that, when that part of the brain is impaired it really doesn't matter because you are using a different aspect of yourself to do what you are doing."

"The brain goes to what's familiar. That's where it wants to return. Is that good thing or a bad thing? It depends on what's familiar."

Study: Stereotype Fit Effects for Golf Putting Non-Experts

Abstract:

Research has connected stereotype threat and regulatory fit by showing improved performance for individuals with negative stereotypes when they focused on minimizing potential losses. In the current study, non-Black participants, who were nonexperts at golf putting, were told that a golf putting task was diagnostic of natural athletic ability (i.e., negative stereotype) or sports intelligence (i.e., positive stereotype). Participants tried to maximize earned points or minimize lost points assigned after every putt, which was calculated based on the distance to a target. Results showed better performance for participants experiencing a fit between their global task stereotype and the task goal, and that regulatory fit allowed for increased attention on the strategies beneficial for task performance. Interestingly, we found that performance of individuals high in working memory capacity suffered greatly when those individuals experienced a regulatory mismatch. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Author: Lisa Grimm

Dr. Lisa Grimm grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and developed an interest in psychology while at Grinnell College (B.A., 2001). After Grinnell, she attended The University of Texas at Austin where she received an M.A., and then a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (2007). Dr. Grimm remained at The University of Texas as a Lecturer and Post-doctoral Fellow until she started as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at The College of New Jersey in the fall of 2009. She is now an Associate Professor. Please see Dr. Grimm's website for more information: http://grimm.pages.tcnj.edu/.  For this project, she collaborated with former TCNJ student, Benjamin Lewis, who was instrumental to the success of the study.  More information about her amazing students and research lab can be found on her lab website: http://misclab.pages.tcnj.edu/.

Links:

Author:

http://grimm.pages.tcnj.edu/

http://misclab.pages.tcnj.edu/.

Study:

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2015-45477-001/

Quotes:

"People generally walk around with like a chronic motivational state."

"If you are in a regulatory fit, you are more able to flexibly switch the kinds of strategies that you are using."

"People need to be aware of the outside pressures that end up changing the underlying motivation."

"Part of that mental toughness is recognizing when you need to adapt. It's kind of the toughness to realize that you have to change course."

Bio:

Matt Belair is a speaker, author, podcaster, athlete and mental trainer with experience in the fields of mental fortitude, Zen, the pursuit of inner peace and positive living, martial arts, marketing, snowboarding, and travel to neuro-linguistic programming, meditation, sport psychology, life coaching, and conscious living.

Matt has travelled the world and put himself in the fire to test his knowledge and his limits. He spent time in Nepal studying meditation with Buddhist monks and survived a near death experience while trekking Everest. Travelled the world as a professional snowboard coach, trained mixed martial arts with pro fighters in Thailand. He has learned the secrets to becoming an effective and powerful leader, speaker and trainer under the guidance of mentor Michel Losier, the best selling author of the Law of Attraction, and spent time in China training with 34th Generation Shaolin Monks, just to name some of his incredible experiences.

In this podcast he discusses his approach to working with athletes and offers advice to anyone that wishes to explore and develop their potential.

Links:

https://zenathlete.com/

http://www.mattbelair.com/

Quotes:

"Whats the secret? The secret is bloody hard work."

"That's how you create your reality, one day at a time."

"Mastery is simplicity."

'Mastery is so basic, it is just the right basics."

Study: Reappraising Threat: How to Optimize Performance Under Pressure

Abstract: Competitive situations often hinge on one pressurized moment. In these situations, individuals' psychophysiological states determine performance, with a challenge state associated with better performance than a threat state. But what can be done if an individual experiences a threat state? This study examined one potential solution: arousal reappraisal. Fifty participants received either arousal reappraisal or control instructions before performing a pressurized, single-trial, motor task. Although both groups initially displayed cardiovascular responses consistent with a threat state, the reappraisal group displayed a cardiovascular response more reflective of a challenge state (relatively higher cardiac output and/or lower total peripheral resistance) after the reappraisal manipulation. Furthermore, despite performing similarly at baseline, the reappraisal group outperformed the control group during the pressurized task. The results demonstrate that encouraging individuals to interpret heightened physiological arousal as a tool that can help maximize performance can result in more adaptive cardiovascular responses and motor performance under pressure.

Author: Lee Moore

Dr. Lee Moore is a lecturer in Sport and Exercise psychology at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. His two main areas of expertise include the effect of gaze training interventions on the acquisition and refinement of motor skills and how pre-competition psychophysiological states influence motor skill performance. His work has led him to working with several professional organizations including the Rugby Football Union, Professional Games Match Officials Limited and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. He has some very exciting upcoming work involving the relationship between psychophysiological states and concepts such as resilience, mental toughness and hardiness. He is also a huge fan of Universal Studios.

Links:

Author: http://www.glos.ac.uk/faculties-and-schools/sport-and-exercise/staff-profiles/pages/s2113142-lee-moore.aspx

Article: http://journals.humankinetics.com/jsep-back-issues/jsep-volume-37-issue-3-june/reappraising-threat-how-to-optimize-performance-under-pressure

Quotes:

"This is one of the first studies to show that arousal re-appraisal can also have a beneficial effect on motor performance, on the accuracy of motor and sporting skills."

"We tend to view increases in physiological arousal…as something that will harm our performance…and is associated with feeling anxious. It is actually just our body preparing itself to perform a task and to perform it well."

Bio:

Brian Lomax is an expert in training mental toughness and competitive skills to highly motivated athletes looking to become their best.  His students have enjoyed success at local, collegiate and national levels in a variety of sports including tennis, golf, football, volleyball, basketball, softball, luge, and figure skating.  He directs the mental skills training programs for several of the best junior tennis academies in New England, and works with a number of Division 1 college sports teams.

Brian received his Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri and completed his undergraduate study at Vanderbilt University.  He achieved a certificate as a Mental Toughness Specialist from the Human Performance Institute and is a certified tennis professional by the USPTA.  On the competitive side, Brian has been a highly ranked tennis player throughout his adult career both nationally and in New England with a career best ranking of #2 in the US in Men's 35 and over singles in 2006.  He continues to compete at a high level and believes that this experience helps him identify with his students.

Links:

www.performancextra.com/brian-lomax/

Quotes from Episode:

"The important thing is to win this match, it's not to get upset about a mistake that I cannot change."

"There is a notion these days that being a perfectionist is a good thing"

'That's what was the major change, focusing on the process, but also figuring out what it (process) was."

"One of the reasons we call mental toughness, you know toughness, is it forces you to make tough choices and one of them is looking at yourself as the reason why things happen."

"If you are blaming things that are outside of your control, then they can never change, and then you can never change."

"If that's how you feel and think when you're playing at your best, well why aren't you working on getting yourself to feel that way?"

Study: Introducing Sport Psychology Interventions: Self-Control Implications

Abstract: Evidence from sequential-task studies demonstrate that if the first task requires self-control, then performance on the second task is compromised (Hagger, Wood, Stiff, & Chatzisarantis, 2010). In a novel extension of previous sequential-task research, the first self-control task in the current study was a sport psychology intervention, paradoxically proposed to be associated with improved performance. Eighteen participants (9 males, 9 females; mean age = 21.6 years, SD = 1.6), none of whom had previously performed the experimental task or motor imagery, were randomly assigned to an imagery condition or a control condition. After the collection of pretest data, participants completed the same 5-week physical training program designed to enhance swimming tumble-turn performance. Results indicated that performance improved significantly among participants from both conditions with no significant intervention effect. Hence, in contrast to expected findings from application of the imagery literature, there was no additive effect after an intervention. We suggest practitioners should be cognizant of the potential effects of sequential tasks, and future research is needed to investigate this line of research.

Author: Tracey Devonport

Dr Tracey Devonport is registered as a Sport and Exercise Psychologist with the Health Care Professions Council. Other certifications include; Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society, accredited with the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (BASES) for scientific support (Psychology) and a Chartered Scientist. Tracey was made a Fellow of BASES in 2015.

Tracey's research interests primarily lie around stress, coping, and emotion regulation. In particular she is interested in applied research with a focus on intervention development and delivery. Other research interest areas include emotional intelligence, emotional eating, self-control, self-efficacy and body image. She has authored more than 45 peer refereed journal articles, three books and 13 book chapters.

Tracey has worked as an applied sport psychology consultant for more than 20 years. She has worked predominantly with junior national athletes in sports such as Tennis, Swimming, Badminton, Judo and Netball.

Links:

Author: https://www.wlv.ac.uk/about-us/our-schools-and-institutes/faculty-of-education-health-and-wellbeing/staff-directory/tracey-devonport/

Article: http://journals.humankinetics.com/tsp-current-issue/tsp-volume-30-issue-1-march/introducing-sport-psychology-interventions-self-control-implications

Quotes:

"In terms of imagery, you don't write a script and go there you are, job done. It is a consistently evolving process really, so that you are moving along with their learning."

"If you are just learning to use imagery, don't use imagery and then follow it by a new skill you are trying to learn."

"There is so much research out there that suggests that imagery doesn't help with a novel skill. This could come down to self-control because you are asking people to use imagery which is going to be novel to them, and then you're asking to them to perform a novel physical skill. That is two repeated acts of self-control. Use imagery independent of the physical scale"

'If you want to do really well on a task, plan your day. Don't try and delimit acts of self-control leading up to that really important task."

'Every time you make a decision, quite often it is an act of self-control."

'Think of self-control like a muscle, so if you use it you are going to tire it."

Study: Does Grit Influence Sport-Specific Engagement and Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise in Elite Youth Soccer?

Abstract: We examined whether soccer players who score low and high on the personality trait grit can be differentiated based on their sport-specific engagement and perceptual-cognitive expertise. Findings revealed that grittier players accumulated significantly more time in sport-specific activities including competition, training, play, and indirect involvement. Moreover, there was a significant main effect for performance on the perceptual-cognitive skills tests across groups, with grittier players performing better than less gritty players on the assessments of decision making and situational probability. The findings are the first to demonstrate a potential link between grit, sport-specific engagement, and perceptual-cognitive expertise.

Author: Paul Larkin

Paul Larkin is a post-doctoral researcher and tertiary educator with extensive experience and knowledge in conducting research projects and developing tertiary level educational content both face-to-face and online. As a tertiary educator for over 7 years, Paul has extensive experience of e-learning strategies, developing and delivering course content using a variety of pedagogical methods to promote the learners engagement in the content. Recently Paul has been involved with a government funded research project, with a key aim to monitor and evaluate Football Federation Australia's National Curriculum for Player Development.

Links:

Author: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-larkin-8814b418

Article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10413200.2015.1085922

Quotes:

"How does (grit) change moving down the talent spectrum?"

"If you do demonstrate kind of grit and tendencies where you have a passion towards long term goals, your hopefully more likely to invest time engaging toward that goal, which hopefully you will be quite successful at."

"A lot of players will try and play what the coaches call FIFA ball"

Study: Adversarial Growth in Olympic Swimmers: Constructive Reality or Illusory Self-Deception?

Abstract: Efforts to regulate emotions can influence others, and interpersonal emotion regulation within teams may affect athletes' own affective and motivational outcomes. We examined adolescent athletes' (N = 451, Nteams = 38) self- and interpersonal emotion regulation, as well as associations with peer climate, sport enjoyment, and sport commitment within a multilevel model of emotion regulation in teams. Results of multilevel Bayesian structural equation modeling showed that athletes' self-worsening emotion regulation strategies were negatively associated with enjoyment, while other-improving emotion regulation strategies were positively associated enjoyment and commitment. The team-level interpersonal emotion regulation climate and peer motivational climates were also associated with enjoyment and commitment. Team-level factors moderated some of the relationships between athletes' emotion regulation with enjoyment and commitment. These findings extend previous research by examining interpersonal emotion regulation within teams using a multilevel approach, and they demonstrate the importance of person- and team-level factors for athletes' enjoyment and commitment.

Author: Karen Howells

Karen is a Lecturer in Sport and Fitness at The Open University. Previously she worked as a lecturer in psychology and sport psychology in a number of face-to-face universities and further and higher education colleges.  Karen joined the Open University in 2015 having completed her PhD at Loughbrough University. The title of her PhD thesis was 'A Qualitative Exploration of Adversarial Growth in Elite Swimmers'. Karen's research arising from her doctorate has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and presented at national and international conferences.

Karen's specialist area is sport and performance psychology. She is a Chartered Sport Psychologist with the British Psychological Society (BPS) and is registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).  She regularly provides sport and performance psychology support to athletes from a wide range of individual and team sports competing at a variety of levels.  She has also delivered non-technical skills to teams within the Oil and Gas Industry and is an ex-Royal Air Force Officer.

Links:

Author: http://www.open.ac.uk/people/klh536

Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27392387

Quotes:

"Post traumatic growth occurs when an individual is shattered by their experiences, but in their recovery go beyond their pre-trauma functioning"

"I am not sure the growth is real (post traumatic). If feels to me like people are talking about growth, when actually there is nothing there."

"Real growth has some kind of change in outlook on life, a philosophical change, real fundamental differences in how people view life."

"The illusory side of growth is more about self-deception; People deceiving themselves into thinking something positive has come from their experiences."

"These individuals are identifying positive outcomes, but they are not real."

"Ideally, I'd like to say we can grow from our experiences, but that's not to say we always grow, or we have to grow."

"Resiliency and growth in some ways are contradictory."

Study: Can You Have Your Vigorous Exercise and Enjoy It Too? Ramping Intensity Down Increases Postexercise, Remembered, and Forecasted Pleasure

Abstract: There is a paucity of methods for improving the affective experience of exercise. We tested a novel method based on discoveries about the relation between exercise intensity and pleasure, and lessons from behavioral economics. We examined the effect of reversing the slope of pleasure during exercise from negative to positive on pleasure and enjoyment, remembered pleasure, and forecasted pleasure. Forty-six adults were randomly assigned to a 15-min bout of recumbent cycling of either increasing intensity (0%-120% of Watts corresponding to the ventilatory threshold) or decreasing intensity (120%-0%). Ramping intensity down, thereby eliciting a positive slope of pleasure during exercise, improved postexercise pleasure and enjoyment, remembered pleasure, and forecasted pleasure. The slope of pleasure accounted for 35%-46% of the variance in remembered and forecasted pleasure from 15 min to 7 days postexercise. Ramping intensity down makes it possible to combine exposure to vigorous and moderate intensities with a pleasant affective experience.

Author: Zachary Zenko

Dr. Zachary Zenko recently earned his Ph.D. in Kinesiology from the Department of Kinesiology at Iowa State University. His undergraduate degree is in Health and Physical Education with a major in Human Performance from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His Master of Science degree is in Health and Physical Activity from the University of Pittsburgh. Zachary combines the field of behavioral economics with exercise psychology in an effort to promote physical activity and exercise behavior. Much of his research focuses on the affective responses to exercise, the measurement of implicit exercise associations, and exercise decision making. Zachary will soon join the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University as a post-doctoral associate.

Links:

Author: https://twitter.com/zackzenko

Article:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298427636_Can_You_Have_Your_Vigorous_Exercise_and_Enjoy_It_Too_Ramping_Intensity_Down_Increases_Postexercise_Remembered_and_Forecasted_Pleasure

Quotes:

"It's important for most people, and listeners to understand that exercise does not need to feel unpleasant or very intense for it to be beneficial."

"I can't tell you how many times I hear that advice being given out with new exercisers. People say oh for, let's say a month or two, this will be unpleasant but there is nothing you can do about it. Once you get over that hump though, then hopefully you will start to enjoy it or it will feel good for you. Umm……..that's not necessary.