Summary: Sport And Exercise Psychology

Read the summary and the most important questions on Sport and Exercise Psychology

• Motivation I

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• What are the benefits of intrinsic motivation?

  
  –Increased enjoyment (Brustad 1988)
  –Better sportsmanship (Vallerand & Losier 1998) (less likely to cheat, sulk etc.)
  –Lower drop-out rates (Gill et al., 1993) – more persistence 
  - Spend more time on the task (Vallerand, Gauvin & Halliwell, 1986)

• What factors would you use to encourage people to engage in sports?

  Intrinsic motivation

• What are 2 disadvantages of extrinsic motivation?

  
  –Increased anxiety in younger athletes about performing well (Scanlan & Lewthwaite 1984)
  –Higher drop-out rates (Lindner et al., 1991)
  
  Anxiety can cause drop outs as anxiety is an aversive emotion and so people will won't to avoid situations where they experience this anxiety

• What is a common limitation of sports literature?

  Important: many of the research are done on children – they are much easier to recruit than elite athletes = be cautious – differentiate between children, adolescence and adults
  - Good if you can get a study on children, then someone proves the same thing in adolescents, then adults

• What are the 2 predictions made by the competence motivation theory?

  
  1. People will persist with activities in which they feel competent
         - Sports participants should be higher in perceived competence than                dropouts or non-participants
         - Intrinsic motivation should be increased by perceived levels of competence
  
  
  2. Intrinsic motivation should be associated with positive affect
          - Feelings of enjoyment, confidence, self esteem --> i.e. the more competent you feel, the more you enjoy it

• What 2 concepts support the competence motivation theory?

  
  •Perceived competence associated with engagement in sport
  •Perceived competence associated with positive affect and behaviour (e.g. enjoyment)

• What 3 limitations of the competence motivation theory?

  
  • The majority of studies focus on youth, college or recreational sport/exercise --> The same factors may not apply to elite professional sports who get paid
  
  • Major issue: Little experimental work - most studies are descriptive or correlational --> they don’t say anything about the direction of causation
  
  • Assumes that making someone believe they are competent will produce motivation- is this really true?  --> You would need to do experimental/empirical research to find this out

• How might you test Competence Motivation Theory?

  • Experimental manipulations e.g. false feedback - if you change the feedback about how the person is doing, you may see changes in their motivation
    

  
  

  • Longitudinal study -> as an individual increases in skill does their enjoyment of the task increase
    

  
  

  • Measure if there is a difference between training and performance. In training, the emphasis is on skill acquisition and mastery --> perhaps this is more enjoyable than the actual performance of the task where the emphasis is more on outcomes  
    

• What are the predictions of the self-determination theory? How does this differ from a simplistic intrinsic/extrinsic account?

  
  • Perception of purpose rewards should affect the level of intrinsic / extrinsic motivation
  • Perception of purpose of rewards influenced by social factors (e.g. coaches, peers, parents etc) - critical point -> shows there is a role for the coach/sports psychologist to persuade the athlete to treat rewards as informational not controlling (you can change the athlete's perception of things)
  • Informational rewards enhance intrinsic motivation
  • Controlling rewards diminish intrinsic motivation
  
  
  Simplistic intrinsic/extrinsic account:
  •Athletes who compete for rewards should show less intrinsic motivation than amateurs/ non professional 

• What did Pelletier et al. (2001) find?

  
  Supported Self Determination Theory
  
  Feelings of lack of competence and autonomy in handball players associated with intention to drop-out 
  
  -> suggesting autonomy is important in intrinsic motivation