Sport psychology
Sport psychology is defined as the study of the psychological basis, processes, and effects of sport. One definition of sport sees it as "any physical activity for the purposes of competition, recreation, education or health".
Sport psychology is an interdisciplinary science that draws on knowledge from related fields such as biomechanics, physiology, kinesiology, and psychology. It studies how psychological factors influence athletic performance, and how participation in sport and exercise impacts psychological, social, and physical well-being. Sport psychologists also teach cognitive and behavioral techniques to athletes to enhance both their performance and overall experience in sports.
A sport psychologist does not focus solely on athletes. This type of professional also helps non-athletes and everyday exercisers learn how to enjoy sports and to stick to an exercise program. A psychologist is someone that helps with the mental and emotional aspects of someone's state, so a sport psychologist would help people in regard to sports, but also in regard to physical activity. In addition to instruction and training in psychological skills for performance improvement, applied sport psychology may include work with athletes, coaches, and parents regarding injury, rehabilitation, communication, team-building, and post-athletic career transitions.
Sport psychologists may also work on helping athletes and non-athletes cope with how training and competition demands, injury and rehabilitation, and major transitions affect multiple life domains.
History of sport psychology
Early history
In its formation, sport psychology was primarily the domain of physical educators, not researchers, which can explain the lack of a consistent history. Nonetheless, many instructors sought to explain the various phenomena associated with physical activity and developed sport psychology laboratories.The history of sport psychology dates back almost 200 years. In 1830, Carl Friedrich Koch published Calisthenics from the Viewpoint of Dietetics and Psychology. Later, in 1879, Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory, where some of the earliest sport psychology experiments were conducted. In 1884, Konrad Rieger researched muscular endurance and hypnosis, while in 1891, Angelo Mosso studied mental fatigue and physical performance. The term "sport psychology" was first used in 1900 by Pierre de Coubertin, who, along with Wundt, made significant contributions in the early 20th century.
In Europe, the field developed largely in Germany. In the early 1920s, Dr. Carl Diem founded the first sport psychology laboratory in Berlin. Around the same time, Robert Werner Schulte established the Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen in 1920, where physical abilities and sport aptitude were studied. In 1921, Schulte also published Body and Mind in Sport. In Russia, sport psychology experiments began as early as 1925 at institutes of physical culture in Moscow and Leningrad, and formal sport psychology departments were formed around 1930. However, it was a bit later during the Cold War period that numerous sport science programs were formed, due to the military competitiveness between the Soviet Union and the United States, and as a result of attempts to increase the Olympic medal numbers. The Americans felt that their sport performances were inadequate and very disappointing compared to the ones of the Soviets, so this led them to invest more in the methods that could ameliorate their athletes performance, and made them have a greater interest on the subject. The advancement of sport psychology was more deliberate in the Soviet Union and the Eastern countries, due to the creation of sports institutes where sport psychologists played an important role.
In North America, early years of sport psychology included isolated studies of motor behavior, social facilitation, and habit formation. During the 1890s, E. W. Scripture conducted a range of behavioral experiments, including measuring the reaction time of runners, thought time in school children, and the accuracy of an orchestra conductor's baton. Despite Scripture's previous experiments, the first recognized sport psychology study was carried out by an American psychologist Norman Triplett, in 1898. The work of Norman Triplett demonstrated that bicyclists were more likely to cycle faster with a pacemaker or a competitor, which has been foundational in the literature of social psychology and social facilitation. He wrote about his findings in what was regarded as the first scientific paper on sport psychology, titled "The Dynamogenic Factors in Pacemaking and Competition", which was published in 1898, in the American Journal of Psychology. Lashley and Watson, pertaining to the learning curve present in archery, provided a template for future habit forming research, as their work proved that humans have a higher level of motivation to achieve a task such as archery in comparison to a mundane task. Researchers Albert Johanson and Joseph Holmes tested baseball player Babe Ruth in 1921, as reported by sportswriter Hugh S. Fullerton. Ruth's swing speed, his breathing right before hitting a baseball, his coordination and rapidity of wrist movement, and his reaction time were all measured, with the researchers concluding that Ruth's talent could be attributed in part to motor skills and reflexes that were well above those of the average person.
The field of sport psychology in general began in the 1960s with the formation of the International Society of Sport Psychology in 1965, The North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity in 1967, and The Canadian Society for Psychomotor Learning and Sport Psychology in 1969. Sport psychology started in 1890 when Norman Triplett performed the first experiment in sport psychology and the social facilitation phenomenon. Then 1925 Coleman Griffith created the Athletic Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Later in 1930 the Soviet Union employed sport psychology during the Cold War. In 1960 sport psychology becomes part of the US and expanded to the whole world. In 1986 the American Psychological Association recognized Sport psychology as a branch of Psychology. In 1992, the Psychology Board of Australia recognized "Sport Psychologist" as a protected title, and in 1993 British Psychology Society formed a sport and exercise psychology section. Studies such as Johanson and Holme's test on Ruth were foundational in the establishment of the importance of sport psychology as a field, both in the eye of the public and the scientific community.
Characteristics of behavioral sport psychology
The first characteristic of behavioral sport psychology involves identifying target behaviors of athletes and coaches to be improved, defining those behaviors in a way so that they can be reliably measured, and using changes in the behavioral measure as the best indicator of the extent to which the recipient of an intervention is being helped.A second characteristic is that behavioral psychology treatment procedures and techniques are based on the principles and procedures of Pavlovian and operant conditioning and are ways of rearranging the stimuli that occur as antecedents and consequences of an athlete's behavior.
The third characteristic is that many of the interventions with athletes have been developed by practitioners with a cognitive–behavioral orientation. Cognitive–behavior therapy typically focuses on cognitive processes frequently referred to as believing, thinking, expecting, and perceiving.
The fourth characteristic is that researchers have relied heavily on the use of single-subject research designs to evaluate interventions in sport settings, including the following:
a focus on individual athletic performance across several practices and competitions;
acceptability by athletes and coaches because no control group is needed, few participants are needed, and sooner or later all participants receive the intervention;
easy adaptability to assess a variety of interventions in practices and competitions; and
effectiveness assessed through direct measures of sport-specific behaviors or outcomes of behaviors.
The fifth characteristic of a behavioral approach is to place a high value on accountability for everyone involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of an intervention.
Social validation in sport psychology
In ABA, the term social validation refers to procedures to ensure that the techniques employed by a practitioner are selected and applied in the best interests of the clients.In behavioral sport psychology, social validation requires that the practitioner constantly seek answers to three questions: What do the athletes think about the goals of the intervention? What do they think about the procedures recommended by the practitioner? What do they think about the results produced by those procedures? Behavior sport psychologists need to be aware of and behave consistently with the set of ethical principles to guide the actions of sport psychologists published in 1995 by the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology, which, in 2006, became the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. These principles of ethics exist with the primary goal of the welfare and protection of individuals, groups, and the public with which the AASP members work. The AASP members make a lifelong commitment to act ethically themselves, encourage ethical behavior in others, and consult with others as needed on ethical concerns.