Today, we know that regular physical activity offers us mental, physical, cognitive and health benefits. Most of our physiological systems are helped by regular exercises and exercises help in the protecting against and the rehabilitating of different chronic diseases (e.g. cancers, diabetes, metabolic disorders like obesity and cardiovascular disease). It builds muscle and strengthens bones, preventing osteoporosis. It helps elderly to maintain their balance and thus reduces their risks of falls. This is important, because falls are the leading cause of mortality (death) and morbidity (disability) in people aged 65 years and older. Exercise also reduces depression and anxiety and it also buffers against stress. Regular exercise maintains brain integrity and improves cognitive functioning across the lifespan. Physical inactivity is an important cause of health problems in western countries. The amount of sedentary behaviour (reading, playing videogames, surfing on the internet) we engage in on a daily basis, predicts ill health. This is independent of how much physical activity we do. Because of these findings, many governments across the world have developed campaigns to promote physical activity and exercises.
The key question within sport psychology is to understand which factors predict sport and exercise behaviour and to use this information to develop interventions to increase and maintain people’s physical activity. Sport psychology also aims to understand how to enhance sport performance. It also aims at increasing our understanding of how people develop beliefs, attitudes and motivations related to exercising and sport participation.
Social psychological theories help explain why people are not as active as they could be and what needs to be done in order to help people to become more active. Theories can be used to design interventions strategies and to evaluate these interventions. Intervention mapping is a framework for planning, implementing and evaluating theory-driven behavioural interventions. Intervention mapping is concerned with:
Diagnosing the problem and identifying which behaviour causes the problem
Examining which theories can explain the behaviour causing the problem in order to identify key variables that predict the desired behaviour
Developing interventions that target antecedents of the desired behaviour
Evaluating the content and process for the intervention
Perceptions of the physical self may affect physical activity or exercise participation of children. According to a study, physical self-worth can be determined by four subcomponents: bodily attractiveness (the extent of seeing oneself as physically attractive), physical strength, physical conditioning (perception of fitness) and sporting competence (successful at various sports). The strongest predictor of global self-worth in children is perception of physical self. So, children may or may not choose to become active exercisers for self-presentational reasons. They can be concerned with the impression they would make while exercising.
Very obese or very skinny individuals may not want to be seen jogging, in swimming costumes or bouncing around in aerobic classes. They may also have concerns about visibility, fear of judgment by others and high social physique anxiety. It’s therefore important to consider self-presentational concerns when developing interventions to promote exercise.
Exercise research focuses on how to motivate people to exercise more or to sustain exercising, but sport psychology research deals with very motivated participants. Sport psychology research tries to understand performance enhancement and help athletes to perform the best they can, given their circumstances. In the following section, the social psychological constructs that are important to understand and enhance sport performance of individuals, groups and teams will be discussed.
The dynamics of teams
Most sport is based around teams, even if it doesn’t seem to be. Take golf. Golf is classed as an individual sport. However, there are many other people involved in the performance of a professional golfer, like a caddy, a swing coach, a sport psychologist and a physiotherapist. Also, social and environmental factors (parents, wife) often play an important role in the success of the athlete. Sport involves complex interactions between team members and support staff. Therefore, developing teamwork is encouraged. This will help each individual achieve their true potential and make everyone satisfied with their contribution. Research shows that teamwork generally results in higher productivity and efficiency in sports.
Sport psychology adopts theories and constructs from basic social psychological frameworks. Team work is essential to high performance of a team. Groups often develop constantly and aren’t static. At times, a group is in harmony and performs well, while at another time, the group is in conflict and performs poorly. Group cohesion is an important factor to understand performance in teams. The conceptual model of cohesion is often used to study sport teams. According to the model, cohesion depends on two dimensions: group integrations vs. personal attraction and social vs. task aspects. Group integration is about the closeness or bonding within a group, while individual attraction to the group is about the individual motivations and perceptions of attractiveness of the group. These two dimensions have social (developing and maintaining social relationships) and task (achieving group goals) aspects. These are independent of each other. So, an athlete can stay involved with a team because the social aspects, the team goals or both.
What is the relationship between athletic performance and cohesion? Studies found a strong positive cohesion-performance relationship (r= .65). This was the case for both task and social cohesion. Gender was a moderator, with female teams having a significantly higher association between cohesion and performance in comparison to male sport teams. However, it’s unclear what the direction of this relationship is, because the studies were correlational in nature. Is a cohesive team more successful or do successful teams become more cohesive? One study found that the correlation between early season performance and cohesion later in the season was stronger than the correlation between early cohesion and later performance. It seems that winning is more likely to result in cohesion than vice versa. However, it’s difficult to get a definitive answer to this question. Success is difficult to define other than in terms of losing and winning. Most likely, the relationship between success and cohesion is bi-directional in nature.
Given the importance of cohesion in teams, a key question for sport psychologists is which factors predict cohesiveness in groups. A group of antecedents that increase group cohesion and consequent performance have been identified:
Team factors: team stability is related to cohesion. It’s difficult to develop cohesion if players are often absent or replaced. In professional sport, it’s not uncommon that players rehabilitate away from the team. This may disrupt cohesion. However, players in teams with high cohesion are more likely to stay with their team. This will increase stability. Cooperation is also important for team cohesion. A cohesive team cooperates and sticks together. Norms and rules about time keeping, communication and dress code also influence cohesion through development of a team identity.
Environmental factors: the size of the group and the individual contracts within groups are important for group cohesion. Group cohesion becomes lower when the size of the team increases. That’s because it’s more difficult to coordinate team activities and communicate effectively. Contractual responsibilities also affect cohesion. Some members can be unhappy with their contracts and want to go to a different team, which reduces team cohesion.
Individual factors: individual cognitions and behaviours influence team cohesion. Studies among cricket-players have shown that elevated levels of sacrifice behaviour within an outside the sport related to increased perceptions of task and social cohesion. This, in turn, resulted in more sacrifice behaviour by the cricket-players. A factor associated with decreased cohesion is social loafing and self-handicapping.
Leadership factors: the way in which a team is coached, in particular the way the members perceive their relationship with the coach, influences team cohesion. Athletes who perceive their coaches as committed, close and that engage in behavioural interactions that are reciprocal do experience enhanced social and task cohesion. Coaches who are more democratic end up having more cohesive teams.
Building successful teams
There are different team building strategies proposed to develop more cohesive sport teams. Most team-building activities have to objective to mobilise a sense of individual responsibility for the team’s performance and pursuit of goals. Team-building can enhance both task and social aspects of groups. It can be developed through adhering to some of the principles below:
Develop feelings of ownership among athletes: athletes need to feel that they are part of the team. They need to be involved in the decision making process. This will make them more committed to the team.
Improve collective efficacy: if the members have a sense of collective competence, they will believe that the team will be successful.
Role acceptance: each player has to feel that he/she has a unique role in the team’s success, and accept this role. This is even the case for bench players.
Team drills that encourage cooperation
Avoid clique formation: cliques can be created by coaches through the use of favouritism or scapegoats. Cliques hinder team goals and result in poor performance.
Expect conflict: the absence of any conflict might indicate lack of interest in group goals. This will result in underperformance. A healthy level of conflict will enhance group cohesion and avoid groupthink.
Personal information: coaches should learn personal aspects of their athlete’s life. Athletes will value and work together with coaches who know things about them.
Best individual athletes in a team
The best individual athletes together do not have to make the most successful sport team. A possible explanation for the poor performance of talented teams might be motivational process or faulty coordination. This has been labelled the Ringleman effect. Ringleman found, in a series of rope pulling series, that with increasing group size, the average effort produced by each performer decreased linearly. It seems that athletes, when performing in a team, do not always perform to their ability. This is especially the case when the efforts of individuals become less noticeable, so in bigger teams.
A number of reasons have been found that explain why individuals loaf. One thing is the lack of identifiability of individual performance. This can reduce motivation and make athletes work less hard. According to the Collective Effort Model, working on a task with a group results in weakening of individual motivation because it lowers individual expectations that their efforts result in goal attainment. According to this model, athletes in teams will exert effort on collective tasks only to the degree to which they expect their effort to help them obtaining the outcomes that they value. Social loafing is independent of culture, nature of the group and gender. The following strategies can be used to reduce social loafing:
Increase athlete self-awareness/ monitor individual performance
Make tasks personally involving: each athlete needs to feel that their contribution is important to the success team-goal achievement
Goal setting
Rotate positions: spending time in team-mate positions will allow understanding of when loafing might occur in different positions
Social facilitation
Almost every exercise activity (e.g. gym class, cardia rehabilitation and competitive sport) is social in nature. Also, coaches, physical educators, fitness instructors and rehabilitators give instruction and feedback, thus exerting social influence. Spectators also exert social influence through their presence. Early experiments conducted in sport psychology focused on the role of others on performance. Triplett found that cyclists who rode in a group or in tandem had a better performance compared to solo races. Triplett suggested that the presence of others liberated latent energy, increasing effort and the speed of the performance. However, until 1965, findings on the presence of others were mixed. Social facilitation theory provides an explanation for the mixed findings. This theory suggests that the mere or imagined presence of others watching you perform a task increases physiological arousal levels, which will facilitate performance of well-learned or simple behaviours. However, increased arousal levels will result in impaired performance when the task is complex or not well practiced. Studies have shown that the mere presence of an audience explained only a small percentage of the variance in performance. Later, this theory was extended by suggesting that the worry of being judged by an audience with regard to one’s performance is important.
Another performance effect in sport occurs when an athlete has the skills and is motivated to do well, but demonstrates inferior performance. This might happen when athletes feel significant pressure to do well and it’s referred to as choking. It can be caused by self-consciousness (paying conscious attention on the performance process, thus interfering with the normal automatic processing). Two opposing explanations try to explain how increased self-consciousness results in choking in sport:
The acclimatisation hypothesis: athletes who have a predisposition to be self-conscious will not be affected by pressure situations.
Reinvestment theory: athletes who have a tendency to reinvest (trying to consciously control one’s own movement with explicit knowledge) are more likely to choke compared to athletes low in dispositional reinvestment. This theory suggests that movement execution regresses from the autonomous stage to the cognitive stage of motor learning during periods of high pressure or stress. Athletes often overthink their technique, which may paradoxically result in less than optimal performance. The presence of others and pressure might induce reinvestment. Praising the opponent on his technique can result in the opponent to become self-conscious and to reinvest.
Game location
The location where the match takes place is an important factor for success in sport. Studies have shown that in many team (and individual) sports, those competing at home have a greater chance of winning. The location where an event takes place influences physiological, psychological and behavioural states of athletes and coaches. This will shape their performance. There are different factors that can explain the home advantage in sport. One is that larger, more dense and more partisan crowds enhance the home advantage. Supportive crowds seem to enhance athletes’ confidence and subsequent performance. However, it seems that larger crowds are associated with the away team performing more poorly rather than the home team performing better. When the crowd protests (booing lasting a minimum of 15 seconds), the performance of the opposite team decreases, while the performance of the home team increases only slightly in comparison to normal conditions. Hostile crowds distract away teams and this inhibits the performance and benefits the home team. Crowds also increase arousal levels.
A relationship has also been found between travel and the home advantage. Travel causes fatigue and a disruption of one’s daily routines. Not much research has been done on the behavioural, physiological and psychological states of athletes competing at home or away from home. You can’t really establish the contribution of each individual factor. Most likely, there is an interaction between different factors. Coaches should try to overcome the disadvantages of competing away from home. A good travel schedule should be made, so that the athletes are not fatigues when competing. They should also maintain their daily routines (eating, training and sleeping times). Psychological skill training can help athletes deal with the stress and anxiety while competing in unfamiliar surroundings.
One must understand what the physiological responses of an athlete are, how best to execute certain movements to optimize performance and to develop exercise programs which appeal to individuals over long periods of time, in order to fully understand the behaviour of athletes. We all know that a regular participation in sport is important for physical and mental health, but the participation rates are quite low across the world. Applied social psychology is important to develop interventions to make people more physically active and to lower their time spend in sedentary activities.
Applied social psychologists needs to work together with public health practitioners and exercise physiologists to develop programs that have the health benefits as well as a wide reach. Applied sport psychologists can also work together with sport scientists to help athletes achieve their full potential.
