Participation in sport and exercise requires self-regulation. Examples of self-regulation include an individual fighting the urge to stop during an intense exercise class, a golfer trying to ignore feelings of excitement and focus on a simple putt to win a tournament, and a soccer player resisting the desire to strike an opponent who has repeatedly
Athletes are often faced with a variety of factors that can throw off their focus on the athletic task, such as worry, unexpected events, and physical exhaustion. Therefore, it is important for athletes to be able to focus or refocus their attention on the athletic task, despite frequently changing circumstances. In this regard, centering is
Imagery involves internally experiencing a situation that mimics a real experience without experiencing the real thing. As a conscious process that is deliberately employed by an athlete or exerciser to serve a specific function, it is distinctly different from daydreaming or just thinking about something. The terms mental rehearsal and visualization are sometimes used to
Affirmation is the act of reflecting on core aspects of the self, such as important values, relationships, and personal characteristics like religion, music, or sports. Previous research shows that self-affirmation interventions can reduce psychological and physiological stress and defensiveness, while boosting personal responsibility and performance. Self-affirmation interventions and theory have promising applications in sports and
The ability to learn defines much that is unique about human behavior and underlies many aspects of sport and exercise psychology (SEP). Attempts to develop sweeping laws of learning have generally been unsuccessful, and it is unlikely that a universal theory of learning can be developed. Learning is often described as a process during which
In sport psychology, concentration refers to focusing on sensory or mental events coupled with mental effort. It therefore relates primarily to the selective attention dimension in which individuals are able to selectively process some sources of information while ignoring others. It has its roots in the oft-cited quote from William James’s 1890 book The Principles
Expertise refers to the underlying qualities and skills that distinguish highly accomplished people, referred to as experts, from lesser skilled people. Experts are people who are exceptionally skilled in a particular task or domain and their expertise is typically evident across numerous aspects of human performance, including perception, cognition, and motor execution. Interestingly, despite the
In sport and exercise psychology, anticipation usually refers to the ability to quickly and accurately predict the outcome of an opponent’s action before that action is completed. Skilled athletes can use bodily cues to anticipate outcomes at earlier moments in an action sequence than can unskilled athletes, allowing them more time to perform an appropriate
Automaticity is the ability to execute a skill using no (or very few) information processing resources: attention and working memory. When a skill can be executed in this fashion, the performer has resources available to process other sources of information not directly required for the task. Automaticity is thought to be a hallmark of expert
Gender has a clear and powerful influence in society, and a particularly powerful and persistent influence in sport and exercise. Indeed, the sport world seems to exaggerate and highlight gender. Sport and physical activities remain largely sex segregated and male dominated. Gender is so embedded that trying to be nonsexist and treating everyone the same