Psychoneuroendocrinology of Sport and Exercise

Foundations, Markers, Trends

Felix Ehrlenspiel, Katharina Strahler, Felix Ehrlenspiel, Katharina Strahler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136479908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Endocrinology & Metabolism

Psychoneuroendocrinology is the study of the interaction between hormones, the brain and human behaviour. This is the first book to examine psychoneuroendocrinology in the context of sport and exercise, offering a comprehensive review of current research and assessment techniques and highlighting directions for future research.

The book explores the links between hormones and behaviour, and draws important conclusions for how their study will aid in the understanding of the bidirectional link between sport and behaviour, central to the psychology of sport and exercise. It presents the key hormones that underpin behaviour in a sporting context, including the description of their physiologic mechanisms and behavioural effects. The book reports benchmark standards for the assessment and analysis of hormonal influences of behaviour in sport, and examines practical issues and contexts such as emotional state, overtraining and stress.

Psychoneuroendocrinology in Sport and Exercise is a breakthrough text that will be of interest to all advanced students and researchers working in the psychology and physiology of sport and exercise.

Part I

Foundations of a Psychoneuroendocrinology of Sport and Exercise

Katharina Strahler and Felix Ehrlenspiel

In this first section the editors, Felix Ehrlenspiel and Katharina Strahler, lay the ground for a psychoneuroendocrinology of sport and exercise by first showing that the psychology of sport and exercise encompasses various perspectives and orientations. After introducing psychoneuroendocrinology, a model is described that might aid in the use of psychoneuroendocrinology for the integration of these perspectives and orientations. In the second chapter of this section, Jana Strahler and Elisabeth Klumbies lay the foundation for the understanding of the following sections. They describe the physiological basics of psychoneuroendocrinology, how studies in psychoneuroendocrinology are designed and how the various markers may be assessed and analysed.

1 Introduction

Felix Ehrlenspiel and Katharina Strahler

One of the fascinating aspects of practising sports or engaging in physical exercise is that we can immediately experience ‘psychology’. We engage in social interaction with our sports team members or our exercise group, and we feel how this interaction affects how we perform as a team or how motivated we are to go and exercise again next week. We experience how each successful basketball free throw or how each extra weight lifted leads to greater self-confidence and a good feeling, but we also experience how worries or a lack of concentration lead to performance failure, or how a lack of motivation keeps us from exercising more often. We also perceive general well-being and our good health after a game of football or exercise session but we also feel the rising tension in our body before the competition or the knot in the stomach when our neighbour again outlasts us on the treadmill.

These phenomena are not just exciting to the individual engaged in sport activities, they are also the subject of scientific study. In sport psychology, the study of human behaviour and experience in sport is aimed at understanding and predicting behaviour but also at eventually applying knowledge gained from this study (see Gill, 2000; Weinberg and Gould, 2003). Recent developments in the field of sport psychology have yielded an increasing interest in the biological basis of phenomenal experiences. Although within this area the brain itself is at the centre of study, there is growing interest in the role of hormones in how the brain exerts its behavioural control – and in how behaviour affects the brain. Before describing a framework for the study of the role of hormones in sport behaviour, we first describe in more detail how human behaviour and experience in sport are studied.

Sport Psychology

The scientific study of the ‘psychology’ experience in sport is thus concerned with human behaviour and experience in this context (see Gill, 2000; Weinberg and Gould, 2003). Here and throughout the book ‘sport’ is used in a more generic fashion. Following the European usage, we understand sport as ‘all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organized participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in competition at all levels’ (European Sports Charter: Council of Europe, 2001). In the Anglo- and especially American usage, sport is usually associated with the aim of obtaining results in competition but not the other goals – which are referred to as exercise – thus representing a narrower meaning. Consequently, the use of sport psychology to describe the field has been considered too narrow, and the term ‘sport and exercise psychology’ has been established (see Gill, 2000). In this chapter as well as throughout the book, the term sport psychology and sport will be used to describe both sport and exercise. Whenever it is necessary to distinguish the two explicitly, the precise term will be used. As the definition of the European Council also shows, physical activity is an even more generic term, including activities such as climbing a staircase, running to catch the bus or cleaning your room. Those will not be the focus of this book.

The term sport psychology incorporates two disciplines of study and research: sport science and psychology. But there is some discussion as to whether sport psychology should be considered a subdiscipline of sport science (e.g. Gill, 2000) or whether sport psychology is actually derived from psychology (Anshel, 2003). In her assignment of sport psychology to sport science, Gill argues that sport psychology lies in the middle of a physical-to-social continuum with ties to all other areas of sport science. What makes sport psychology a subdiscipline of sport science is that it integrates theories and information from the other sport science fields and psychology to create unique knowledge specific to the field of sport (Gill, 2000). Anshel (2003), however, argues that sport psychology is derived from the traditional disciplines of psychology such as social psychology, developmental psychology or cognitive psychology. Nevertheless, the development of sport psychology as a field of study and research is rooted in physical education (Anshel, 2003). Thus most sport psychology programmes at university level are located in sport science departments (often under the name of kinesiology or human movement) rather than in psychology departments (Morris et al., 2003).

Although the discussion whether sport psychology is a subdiscipline of sport science or of psychology may seem a bit academic, it clearly shows that study and research can address behaviour and experience in sport from either of the two perspectives by laying an emphasis either on psychology or on sport (Weinberg and Gould, 2003, in similar vein use the term ‘objective’). The first perspective, which one might call the psychology perspective, views the field from psychology and is concerned with the effects of ‘the mind’, that is, psychological states or variables on sport behaviour. This perspective is probably the most common view taken by research in sport psychology, and it is also the oldest. The earliest studies in sport psychology, carried out at the end of the nineteenth century, found that performance in a motor skill was enhanced in the presence of others (Triplett, 1898). And the classic study by Yerkes and Dodson (1908), although originally investigating the behaviour of rats, led to the investigation of the effects of arousal and anxiety on the performance of sports tasks. This line of research also shows the complexity of the relation between psychology and sport: the relation between arousal, anxiety and sports performance is still being investigated today (cf. reviews by Craft et al., 2003; Woodman and Hardy, 2003) and it appears that not only do more mental and more physical components need to be separated but also the relationship appears to be highly individual (Hanin, 2000).

The second perspective, which one might call the sport perspective, views the field from within sport and is concerned with the effects of sport behaviour on the mind. The key question here is whether and how sports activities affect mental well-being and health. With reference to the roman proverb ‘mens sana in corpore sano’ it is generally assumed that sport, but especially physical exercise, has positive effects on mood and affect but also reactivity to stress (e.g. Gerber, 2008; Wipfli et al., 2008).

Independent of the perspective of sport psychology, within research, but also within practice or application, three main orientations may be distinguished (Weinberg and Gould, 2003). The social–psychological orientation is interested in the interaction in the sports context of an individual with his or her environment, especially with other individuals; it is also interested in how our assumptions about the world form our cognitions, decisions and behaviour. With respect to the psychology perspective, for example, teams have been found to perform better if they exhibit at least some task cohesion (Carron et al., 2002), and exercising in a group generally leads to a better adherence to an exercise programme (Burke et al., 2008). With respect to the sport perspective it has been shown that, for example, motor experience in a sport activity influences referees’ perceptual decisions (Dosseville et al., 2011).

The second main orientation may be labelled the cognitive–behavioural orientation, as it is interested not only in the role of cognitions in the determination of behaviour, such as thoughts and feelings, but also attentional or motivational processes. Again, from a psychology perspective research has found, for example, that anxiety associated with evaluative situations in sport leads to a more controlled movement execution and consequently performance failure (Beilock and Carr, 2001; Ehrlenspiel et al., 2010) and that focusing on the platform rather than on the feet enhances motor learning in a balancing task in older adults (Chiviakowsky et al., 2010). From a sport perspective it has been found that athletes learn to develop self-regulatory skills (Szymanski et al., 2004) and that physical exercise has been shown to lead to improved cognitive functioning even in elderly persons (Erickson and Kramer, 2009).

The third orientation identified by Weinberg and Gould (2003) is interested in the physiological processes underlying or accompanying behaviour and psychological states in sport. Again, from a psychology perspective research has shown, for example, that the ability to regulate physiological responses such as skin conductance or muscle tone can lead to better sport performance (Bar-Eli and Blumenstein, 2004). And from a sport perspective, winning a competition in a fight sport is thought to lead to increased levels of testosterone (Filaire et al., 2001), commonly associated with a higher level of aggression, and acute exercise has been linked with increased alpha-band activity in the EEG (e.g. Crabbe and Dishman, 2004), commonly associated with a relaxed state.

Although the social–psychological and cognitive–behavioural orientations are still dominant, the psychophysiological orientation has more recently received increased attention in sport and exercise psychology research. This is evidenced, for example, by the publication of a review textbook entitled Psychobiology of Physical Activity, edited by Acevedo and Ekkekakis (2006a). This discusses the contribution that psychobiology has made to our understanding of all questions in the field of sport psychology, and gives examples concerning the psychobiology of physical activity and cognition, emotion, mental health and human performance. Understanding psychobiology as the broader term, the volume encompasses methods from psychophysiology (for example measuring cortical activity or skin conductance), physiology (heart rate) and also neurophysiology (assessment of neurotransmitters), psychoneuroimmunology and psychoneuroendocrinology (assessment of cytokines or hormones).

Acevedo and Ekkekakis (2006b) also chart the progress of the study of sport and exercise psychology from a psychobiological orientation following earlier and less positive assessments by Hatfield and Landers (1983) or Dishman (1994). They also clearly point to the need for an integrative science that respects the multiple levels of analysis of human behaviour in sport (for example the social, cognitive and physiological orientations). The social–psychological and cognitive–behavioural orientations have long demonstrated a neglect of the psychobiological orientation, as evidenced, for example, by a lack of this orientation in current textbooks of sport psychology (cf. Gill, 2000; Anshel, 2003; Weinberg and Gould, 2003).

It appears that the progress of psychobiology within sport psychology has also been hindered by a neglect of the psychological or cognitive orientation. Acevedo and Ekkekakis (2006b) argue that for progress of sport and exercise psychology to occur it is important to seek evidence from these different levels of analysis and to relate each level or orientation to one another. Not only must psychological theories be physiologically plausible (and testable), but psychobiological study must also be based on sound psychological theories. Importantly, this integration of the orientations needs to occur within sport psychology, because theories and models of behaviour and experience in sport are integrated into biological theories. Consequently, this integration also needs to be pursued by sport psychologists, because they have the knowledge of the psychological phenomena, questions, theories and models in sport. However, for this integration to occur within sport psychology by sport psychologists, a better understanding of psychobiological theories and methods is necessary.

To a large extent, psychobiology in sport and exercise psychology today is concerned with neuroscience with a focus on electrophysiological and brain imaging studies. In this book we want to provide insights into an exciting field of psychobiology that should receive more attention and that should complement the current trend of neurophysiology in sport because it allows a better understanding of the interaction between the brain and the body: this is the field of psychoneuroendocrinology.

Psychoneuroendocrinology

As the term implies, the basis of psychoneuroendocrinology is the study of the interaction and the interdependence of psychological, neurological and endocrine mechanisms (e.g. McCubbin, 2000). It is based on behavioural endocrinology, which shows how the endocrine system affects behaviour and vice versa. Furthermore, it not only acknowledges the role of the central nervous system (CNS) in mediating these relations between the endocrine system and behaviour but it also expands the level of analysis by including psychological variables (i.e. the mind – e.g. mental and affective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Foundations of a psychoneuroendocrinology of sport and exercise
• Part II: Markers
• Part III: Research trends
• Index