The developmental psychologist Jacquelynne Eccles suggested that parents influence their children’s involvement in sport in three ways: as providers, role models, and interpreters. Parents provide children with opportunities to participate in sport by signing them up for programs, transporting them to practices and matches, paying registration fees, and so on. Parents can act as role
Roles are important structural components of all groups and represent the expectations for behaviors of individuals within a particular social situation. This entry briefly highlights the history, types, and emergence of roles and presents a number of cognitive (e.g., role clarity), affective (e.g., role satisfaction), and behavioral (e.g., role performance) elements to role involvement. History
Status represents an individual’s social standing in relation to others. Attributes of status can be based upon physical characteristics (e.g., age) or intangible attributes (e.g., prestige, prominence). Individuals with higher status are often afforded more social benefits including respect, more unsolicited help from others, greater praise for performance, disproportionate credit for successful collaborative efforts, and
Like sport psychology (SP), the field of sport psychiatry may involve utilization of psychological approaches to enhance athletic performance. However, a primary focus of sport psychiatry is diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in athletes. Sport psychiatry is a relatively new field, and as such, the research base is still developing. This entry reviews the
Sport and exercise psychology (SEP) services (e.g., team interventions, one-on-one interventions, and consultation with organizations) aim at performance enhancement with athletic populations and exercise adherence with physically active individuals. In addition, SEP practitioners design their interventions to promote healthy lifestyles and to contribute to their clients’ personal growth, psychological well-being (PWB), and quality of life
Supervision is a central component of professional training and development, providing opportunities for sport psychology (SP) practitioners at all levels to use the experiences and knowledge of others to examine themselves. Supervision is also required for certification or licensure (e.g., registration, chartering) in most of the psychology and helping professions (e.g., psychology, counseling, social work)
How Does Enjoyment Affect Athletes’ Motivation in Sport? Sport enjoyment has important motivational consequences and is incorporated into many theories dealing with athletes’ participation, persistence, and exertion of effort in their sport. Findings show that the higher the enjoyment experienced, the more athletes elect to participate and persist in their sport, the more they feel
Satisfaction is recognized as an important determinant of motivation and commitment in sport and exercise. Although researchers and practitioners have acknowledged that satisfaction influences motivated behavior and also represents a desirable cognitive emotional end state in itself, satisfaction is not recognized as a distinct emotion or mood state. Satisfaction has been used interchangeably in the
Optimism is an expectation for positive or desirable outcomes to occur. Viewed by some as an inherent and evolutionarily adaptive aspect of human biology, it has been examined by psychologists both as a relatively stable dispositional trait (“big optimism”) and as a less stable, situation-specific state of mind (“little optimism”). In its dispositional form, optimism
Perfectionism is a personality disposition characterized by striving for flawlessness and setting exceedingly high standards for performance, accompanied by tendencies for overly critical evaluations. It is a disposition that may pervade all areas of life, particularly areas in which performance plays as major role (e.g., work, school). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that perfectionism