Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

increases in physiological arousal and cognitive state anxiety do not inevitably lead to a deterioration in athletic performance ...

final round of the 1996 US Masters’ championship in Augusta to lose to Nick Faldo. More recently, the American golfer John Daly ...

was postulated to reflect a neurological condition called “dystonia” in which a deterioration occurs in the motor pathways invol ...

Box 3.5 Thinking critically about...explanations of choking behaviour in athletes At first glance, choking in sport can be expla ...

stage of skill acquisition. By the way, some helpful practical tips on how to counteract choking are provided by Coop and Mortic ...

To illustrate, consider what Jack Nicklaus, who is statistically the greatest golfer ever by virtue of winning eighteen major to ...

Becoming more aware of anxiety: interpreting arousal signals constructively Despite their talent and experience, many athletes h ...

are omitted? What are the differences between the situation in which athletes might listen to a relaxation tape and the competit ...

In summary, this section of the chapter suggests that athletes can learn to cope with pressure situations by using at least four ...

1 Based on the research of Thomas et al. (2002), you could investigate possible changes in athletes’ experiences of arousal and ...

Chapter 4 Staying focused in sport: concentration in sport performers I have learned to cut out all the unnecessary thoughts ... ...

Doherty in the 2003 world championship final. But can psychological techniques help athletes to turn on and turn off their conce ...

of attention refers to at least three different cognitive processes: concentration or effortful awareness, selectivity of percep ...

whereas task difficulty is believed to reduce it (ibid.). Unfortunately, the resource metaphor of divided attention is somewhat ...

Johnson, the multiple Olympic gold-medallist, attributed much of his athletic success to an extraordinary skill in selective att ...

flow as a “state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity” (p. 130). In summary, studie ...

an outstanding athletic performance? Give reasons for your answer. Finally, do you think that athletes can be trained to experie ...

can provide only a brief overview of these paradigms here. For a more detailed review of these methodological approaches, see Ab ...

using self-report instruments (Boutcher, 2002). Second, the TAIS assesses perceived, rather than actual, attentional skills. Acc ...

target sport performers can indeed “switch on” their concentration processes at will. Interestingly, a recent study by Radio, St ...