Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

Box 5.6 Thinking critically about...athletes’ use of mental imagery

Many applied sport psychologists provide lists of assumed applications of mental
imagery by athletes. For example, Vealey and Greenleaf (1998) suggested that athletes
use imagery to enhance three types of skills: physical (e.g., a golf putt), perceptual (e.g.,
to develop a strategic game-plan) and psychological (e.g., to control arousal levels).
Within these three categories, imagery is alleged to be used for the following purposes:

• Learning and practising sport skills (e.g., rehearsing a tennis serve mentally before
  going out to practise it on court);


• Learning strategy (e.g., formulating a game-plan before a match);


• Arousal control (e.g., visualising oneself behaving calmly in an anticipated stressful
  situation);


• Self-confidence (e.g., “seeing” oneself as confident and successful);


• Attentional focusing/re-focusing (e.g., focusing on the “feel” of a gymnastics routine);


• Error correction (e.g., replaying a golf swing slowly in one’s mind in order to rectify
  any flaws in it);


• Interpersonal skills (e,g,, imagining the best way to confront the coach about some
  issue);


• Recovery from injury/managing pain (e.g., visualising healing processes).

Critical thinking issues
Sometimes, speculation goes beyond the evidence in sport psychology. To explain,
there is a big difference between speculating about what athletes could use imagery for
and checking on what they actually use it for in sport situations. For example, few studies
have found any evidence that athletes use imagery to enhance either interpersonal skills
or recovery from injury. Therefore, despite the unqualified enthusiasm which it
commonly receives in applied sport psychology, mental imagery is not a panacea for all
ills in sport. Clearly, it is advisable to adopt a sceptical stance when confronted by claims
about the alleged use of mental imagery by athletes.

How can we test the claims made in Box 5.6? To answer this question, two main
research strategies have been used by sport psychologists: descriptive and theoretical.
Whereas the descriptive approach has tried to establish the incidence of general imagery
use in athletes, the theoretical approach has examined specific categories of imagery use
(e.g., imagery as an aid to motivation and cognition) in these performers. These two
approaches to imagery use can be summarised as follows.
Using the descriptive approach, special survey instruments have been designed to
assess imagery use in various athletic populations. This approach has led to some
interesting findings. For example, successful athletes appear to use imagery more
frequently than do less successful athletes (Durand-Bush, Salmela and Green-Demers,
2001). We should not be surprised at this discovery because Murphy (1994) reported that
90 per cent of a sample of athletes at the US Olympic Training Centre claimed to use
imagery regularly. Also, Ungerleider and Golding (1991) found that 85 per cent of more

Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 146