Key Concepts in Sport Psychology

John Kremer, Aidan Moran, Graham Walker, Cathy Craig

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849200523, 9781849200516
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"An excellent text to offer more depth on theories and concepts within Sports Psychology and provide learners with a greater understanding of current psychological theories. The text helps in enforcing knowledge gained and also provides a plethora of references for further reading around any of the chapters covered within the text."
- John Harrison, Tyne Metropolitan College

"This book provides a good introduction to sports psychology, and enables students to obtain a basic understanding of the key concepts. I will recommend this book to my level 4 students."
- Marie Robbins, Grimsby Institute of Further and Higher Education

"Provided an excellent synthesis of key topics in sport psychology. The content draws upon leaders in the field both from a research and applied sport psychology perspective."
- Andrew Balsdon, Canterbury Christ Church University

This book provides a focused, accurate guide for students working within the dynamic field of sport psychology.

The concise and authoritative entries have been selected by experienced teachers and researchers; each one defines, explains and develops a key topic in sport psychology acting as a springboard for further reading and debate. This is a stimulating and practical resource for students defined by the clarity of writing and relevant examples. Each concept gives the student:

• clear definitions
• up-to-date suggestions for further reading
• careful cross-referencing.

 Easy to use and intelligently judged this book offers the modern student the basic materials, tools and guidance for planning essays and passing exams.

1

Introducing Sport Psychology

1.1: The History of sport Psychology

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Definition: The chronology of key events in the development of sport psychology from its earliest roots through to the present day.

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Contrary to popular opinion, sport psychology is not a new phenomenon (Kremer and Moran, 2008). From the time of the Ancient Greeks there is strong evidence to show that preparation for sporting competition has been willing to acknowledge the mental alongside the physical. Indeed, the standard four-day procedure followed by Greek athletes in the build-up to their games (known as the tetrad) incorporated specific time set aside for psychological skills training, including concentration (Day 2) and relaxation (Day 4).

Given the importance that commentators, both paid and unpaid, routinely attach to ‘the mind’ in athletic performance, it should come as no surprise to learn that the world of sport has long recognised that success will depend on ‘total preparation’ involving the mind as well as the body. However, despite this tacit acceptance, sport psychology had to wait several centuries before finally being afforded due recognition as an academic enterprise in its own right (Green and Benjamin, 2009), and even today there is still resistance from traditionalists who resent the interference of ‘shrinks’ in what they see as their unsullied world of sport.

From ancient roots it took until the early 20th century to see the coming-together of the subdiscipline from diverse sources – but not before a number of false trails had been laid. While there had been some interest in sporting personalities, play, motor learning, reaction times and transfer of training around the turn of the 19th century, the individual who is now generally credited with carrying out the earliest systematic sport psychology research is Norman Triplett.

Born in Illinois in 1861, Triplett was awarded his baccalaureate degree by Illinois College (Jacksonville) at the age of 28, followed by his Masters two years later in 1898, and finally his PhD from Clark University in 1900. Although his interests were wide ranging (his PhD was on the topic of conjuring deceptions), it is his Masters’ thesis that has become his lasting legacy not only to sport psychology but also another subdiscipline, social psychology. His dissertation was based on archival and experimental investigations of what he coined ‘dynamogism’ (now known as social facilitation, or the improvement in performance in the presence of others – see 5.25). The archival research considered recorded cycling times either alone, paced or in competition, while his experimental work involved children winding silk line onto a fishing reel so as to pull a flag around a track. A keen sportsperson (he was one of the first US athletes to run the 100 yards in under 10 seconds) and active supporter of all forms of sport, in 1901 he became Head of the Department of Child Study at Kansas State Normal School (KSNS) where he continued to work until his retirement in 1931, all the while extending his fulsome support to all forms of sporting activity within the college (Davis et al., 1995).

While Triplett had made some important observations, his academic legacy was not strong and until the 1930s evidence of sport psychology activity in the western world was sparse. In contrast, from the late 19th century onwards in eastern European universities there had been more concerted efforts to establish sport psychology as a scientific discipline. The world’s first dedicated sport psychology laboratory opening in 1920 at the Deutsche Sporthochschule (German Sport University) in Berlin under Dr Carl Diem, a person who played a positive and significant role in the development of European sport, a role later overshadowed by his involvement as chief organiser of the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics (later referred to as Hitler’s Games).

In the former USSR, from the 1920s onwards both Avksenty Cezarevich (A.C.) Puni (1898–1986) and Piotr (Peter) Roudik played key roles in the establishment of sport psychology (see Ryba et al., 2005). Professor Puni opened a sport psychology laboratory at the Institute of Physical Culture in Leningrad in the 1920s and had a wide ranging interest in both pure and applied sport psychology. At around the same time Roudik established the first Soviet sport psychology laboratory in Moscow (1925), where he focused his attention not on competitive sport but the psychophysiology of motor behaviour. These endeavours reflected in longstanding interests in the psychology of sport that stretched throughout the 20th century in eastern Europe.

It was in that decade that the person now generally regarded as the founding father of contemporary western sport psychology began to carve out his career at the University of Illinois. Born in 1893, Coleman Griffith was a lecturer in educational psychology at the University of Illinois when, with the help of his Dean and mentor Professor George Huff, he turned his sights towards sport psychology. Following his introduction of taught courses in sport psychology from 1923, in 1925 he set up the Athletic Research Laboratory and worked frenetically, writing more than 20 sport psychology articles and two books up until 1931. Sadly, the entire enterprise within the University then came apart for reasons now obscure but perhaps related to the Great Depression, or perhaps because the college’s head football coach, the legendary and highly influential Robert Zuppke, failed to see any benefit accruing to his team from all this academic research (Green, 2003).

Disillusioned, Griffith then turned his attention back towards educational psychology, only once returning to sport psychology in 1937 when he was asked to work with the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club by the club’s owner, Philip Wrigley. Griffith worked more or less closely with management for three years but the relationship eventually petered out. The Cubs’ manager, Charlie Grimm, referred to Griffith as the ‘headshrinker’, and would have nothing to do with his work (Gould and Pick, 1995) despite the considerable investment that the club had made in recording equipment and the huge investment that Griffith himself made in time, effort and report writing, including detailed analysis of every players’ performances, a very early forerunner of what is now so influential in most professional sports, notational analysis or the systematic recording and analysis of performance.

The years following Griffith were fallow for most of sport psychology in the West, apart from a continuation of the longstanding interest in motor learning and motor control on both sides of the Atlantic. In eastern Europe the early work involving competitive sport continued to be studied in European universities, such as Leipzig, often in conjunction with applied research, for example involving the mental preparation of Soviet cosmonauts. By 1960, sport psychologists were routinely working with elite Eastern Bloc athletes, and from the 1970s onwards Olympic competitors from countries including the USSR, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia used sport psychologists to help with self-regulation, mental practice and imagery (Roberts and Kimiecik, 1989).

It was around this time that sport science began to truly emerge (Massengale and Swanson, 1997) as coaches considered how various disciplines, including psychology, could help improve performance. Ahead of its time, the Brazilian soccer team that won the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 had brought along not only a nutritionist and a dentist but also a psychologist, Prof. Joao Carvalhaes. Carvalhaes conducted various tests on the players to determine their mental toughness, including asking them to sketch pictures of men. From such tests he concluded that the 17-year-old Pelé was, ‘obviously infantile. He lacks fighting spirit. He is too young to feel aggression and react in an adequate fashion.’ Fortunately the team coach Feola trusted his instincts. According to Pelé’s autobiography, ‘He just nodded gravely at the psychologist, saying: “You may be right. The thing is, you don’t know anything about football. If Pelé’s knee is ready, he plays.” Which he did’ (Pelé, 1977).

Prominent among European practitioners at this time was Dr Miroslav Vanek (Vanek and Cratty, 1970). As well as working directly with athletes, and including the Czechoslovakian team that travelled to the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968, along with Ferrucio Antonelli, he was instrumental in helping found a pioneering body specifically constituted to further the advancement of sport psychology. This was the International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP), and its first congress was held in Rome in 1965.

Over the next ten years a succession of other organisations sprang up on either side of the Atlantic including the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Activity (NASPSA, 1969), the Fédération Européenne de Psychologie de Sport et des Activités Corporelles (FEPSAC, 1969) and the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP, 1986) (see 1.4). However, the driving force behind all these initiatives came not from within psychology but from physical education and sport science, and the major ‘players’ within sport psychology all came from these disciplines. Indeed, the first body to regulate the practice of sport psychologists in the UK was not the British Psychological Society but the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (BASES, first founded in 1984), and it was not until the late 1980s that the parent discipline of psychology slowly began to take greater interest in sport psychology. For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) formed a separate division in 1987 (Division 47: Exercise and Sport Psychology), and it was in 1993 that the British Psychological Society (BPS) first set in motion the long procedure that eventually led to the creation of a separate BPS division ‘Sport and Exercise Psychology’ in 2004. Nowadays the discipline’s governing bodies are increasingly concerned with regulating the use of the term ‘sport psychologist’. For example, in the UK only those who are chartered through the BPS have the right to describe themselves by this title, and currently there are around 200 individuals who are either chartered or are in the process of becoming chartered.

The history of sport psychology has been divided, chequered and tortuous, and it continues to make its mark to this day. Those who did not graduate as psychologists feel disenfranchised now that the parent discipline has attempted to exert greater control, while across sport psychology there continues to be tension between those who ‘do’ or practice sport psychology, and those who teach or research. Despite these tensions, the subdiscipline continues to grow and flourish.

REFERENCES

Davis, S.F., Becker, A.H. and Huss, M.T. (1995) Norman Triplett and the dawning of sport psychology. The Sport Psychologist, 9, 366–375.

Gould, D. and Pick, S. (1995) Sport psychology: The Griffith era, 1920–1940. The Sport Psychologist, 9, 391–405.

Green, C.D. (2003) Psychology strikes out: Coleman R. Griffith and the Chicago Cubs. History of Psychology, 6, 267–283.

Green, C.D. and Benjamin, L.T. (eds) (2009) Psychology Gets in the Game: Sport, Mind, and Behavior, 1880–1960. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Kremer, J. and Moran, A. (2008) Swifter, higher, stronger: The history of sport psychology. The Psychologist, 21 (8), 748–750.

Massengale, J.D. and Swanson, R.A. (eds) (1997) The History of Exercise and Sport Sciences. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Pelé, with Fish, R.L. (1977) My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pelé. New York: Doubleday.

Roberts, G.C. and Kimiecik, J.C. (1989) Sport psychology in the German Democratic Republic: An interview with Dr Gerard Konzag. The Sport Psychologist, 3, 72–77.

Ryba, T., Stambulova, N. and Wrisberg, C. (2005) The Russian origins of sport psychology: A translation of an early work of A.C. Puni. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 17, 157–169.

Vanek, M. and Cratty, B.J. (1970) Psychology and the Superior Athlete. New York: Macmillan.

1.2: Practising Sport Psychology

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Definition: The translation of sport psychology theory into practice through appropriate professional interventions with athletes and teams.

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In the first instance, how does someone become a practising sport psychologist? On the one hand, the trite answer would be ‘it is not difficult as anyone who voices an opinion on sport performance by definition becomes a naïve sport psychologist’. These views may not be informed, solicited or even welcomed, but if they have an effect on an athlete’s thoughts, feelings or performance, either positively or negatively, then unwittingly that person will already have practised as a sport psychologist. However, that type of spontaneous intervention is quite different from one that has been grounded in the necessary skills, experience and knowledge to make a positive and long-lasting impact for the good of the athlete or team. Good sport psychologists try to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of helping the psychological work in harmony with the physical in improving sport performance and athlete wellness (Andersen, 2000, 2005).

To ensure that the goods on offer are not damaged, psychology’s governing bodies have worked hard to establish strict criteria and regulations governing the use of the title ‘sport psychologist’. To become accredited as a sport psychologist in the UK, at the time of writing, you can follow one of two routes. The body that oversees the governance of professional psychology across the UK, the British Psychological Society (BPS), normally requires a first degree in psychology (or a closely related discipline) which qualifies the person for Graduate Basis for Chartered Member (GBC), followed by an approved higher degree related to Sport and Exercise Psychology, followed in turn by a lengthy period of supervised experience. In contrast, the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (BASES) requires a first degree in either psychology or sport science, followed by a higher degree in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Foreword
• 1: Introducing Sport Psychology
• 2: Anxiety and Stress
• 3: Motivation and Commitment
• 4: Cognitive Processes in Sport
• 5: Social Psychology of Sport
• 6: Motor Skills
• 7: Sport and Well-being
• Index