Examining the relationship between athletes' achievement goal orientation and ability to employ imagery

ObjectiveImagery ability may be cognitively regulated by motivational states, thus it is important to determine the relationship between goal orientations and imagery ability. Design/Method: Participants were 272 male and female athletes, representing nine sports. Goal orientations and cognitive and motivational imagery abilities were assessed via questionnaires. Task and ego goal orientations were examined via a two-step cluster analysis procedure, resulting in the identification of four goal orientation clusters. Separate multivariate analyses were conducted to assess differences in cognitive imagery ability and motivational imagery ability for the clusters, with gender and sport type entered as covariates. Results: For cognitive imagery ability, gender had a significant effect for athletes with low task/low ego orientation; female athletes rated their internal imagery perspective as clearer and more vivid. Regarding motivational imagery ability, when sport type was controlled for, cluster membership demonstrated a significant multivariate effect. Goal orientations have a relationship with motivational imagery ability but this same relationship was not evident with cognitive imagery ability. Athletes with high task/high ego or high task/low ego goal orientations scored significantly higher on their ability to feel emotions and their ease of generating motivational general-mastery images compared to athletes with low task/high ego or low task/low ego orientations. No differences between goal orientation clusters were found for motivational general-arousal imagery ability. Conclusion: Athletes who have a high task orientation are very motivated and have an easy time forming mastery images and a high ability to experience the emotion of these images.     

Consequences of prosocial and antisocial behavior for the recipient

Statement of problemAlthough studies have examined antecedents of prosocial and antisocial behaviors in sport, little is known about the potential consequences of these behaviors for the recipient. In this research, we examined: (a) whether teammate prosocial and antisocial behaviors are related to athletes’ effort, performance, enjoyment and anger during a match and the mediating role of enjoyment and anger (Studies 1 and 2); and (b) whether prosocial and antisocial behaviors are related to commitment to play for one’s team and whether enjoyment and performance mediate these relationships (Study 2).MethodRight after a game, football/soccer (N = 203; Study 1) and basketball (N = 281; Study 2) players completed a multi-section questionnaire measuring the aforementioned variables.ResultsProsocial teammate behavior was positively related to effort, performance, and enjoyment, and enjoyment mediated the relationship between prosocial teammate behavior and effort and performance; prosocial teammate behavior was also positively related to commitment directly and indirectly through enjoyment and performance. Antisocial teammate behavior was positively related to anger and negatively related to effort and performance. Anger and performance mediated the effects of antisocial teammate behavior on effort and commitment, respectively.ConclusionsOur findings demonstrate the importance of acting prosocially and not acting antisocially toward one’s teammates and have implications for enjoyment, effort, performance, and commitment in sport.     

The role of the Self in assessing doping cognition: Implicit and explicit measures of athletes’ doping-related prototype perceptions

ObjectivesTo examine athletes’ implicit and explicit prototype perceptions of performance enhancing substance (PES) users and non-users.DesignA cross-sectional mixed-method study.MethodsCompetitive athletes from 39 sports (N = 226; mean age = 27.66 ± 9.74 years; 59% male) completed four self-report questions and two Brief Implicit Association Tests online, assessing prototype favourability and similarity of PES users and non-users.ResultsAthletes explicitly associated themselves with a non-user (M = 3.13 ± 0.92) more than a PES user (M = 0.56 ± 0.88) and perceived a non-user (M = 89.92 ± 14.98) more favourably than a PES user (M = 13.18 ± 21.38). Indexing behaviour on self-reports, doping contemplators did not differ from ‘clean’ athletes in their perceptions of PES user prototypes while dopers perceived PES users favourably and similar to themselves. In comparison, doping contemplators paired the concept of 'dopers' easier with themselves than with others, while clean athletes and dopers had no preference for either pairing (D = −0.33, -0.08 and 0.01, respectively). All groups demonstrated some degree of preference for ‘good and doper’, moving from slight to moderate to strong preference in the groups of clean athletes, dopers and contemplators, respectively (D = −0.20, −0.37 and −0.80, respectively).ConclusionsResults suggest that doping contemplators may have a positive bias towards doping which is not endorsed in self-reports. Implicit preferences, along with the disparity between the implicit and explicit measures of athletes’ doping-related prototype perceptions advance understanding of doping behaviour and make a unique contribution to research methodology. Factors influencing the interplay between explicit and implicit endorsements of PES user prototypes warrant further research.     

Imagery and self-efficacy in the injury context

ObjectivesTo develop and test the factorial validity of an adapted version of the Athletic Injury Imagery Questionnaire (AIIQ-2: Sordoni, Hall, & Forwell, 2002). To explore the effect of an imagery intervention on self-efficacy in the sport injury context.DesignStudy 1, cross-sectional; Study 2, multiple-base line.MethodIn Study 1 the AIIQ-2 was adapted to include a pain management subscale. This adapted imagery questionnaire (AIIQ-3) was then administered to 291 injured athletes (M age = 28.64 years, SD = 14.30). In Study 2 using a multiple-baseline single subject design, the effects of an imagery intervention on self-efficacy prior to physiotherapy treatment of five athletes with a Type B malleolar fracture (M age = 49.50 years, SD = 16.56) was examined. A follow-up post-experimental interview explored participants' perceptions of the intervention.ResultsStudy 1, confirmatory factor analysis revealed evidence for the factorial validity of the AIIQ-3. Study 2, results from the multiple-base line design demonstrated that for two out of the five participants there were observable and statistically meaningful increases in task efficacy, with the same result in three out of five participants for coping efficacy. The post-interview results revealed that all intervention participants perceived the intervention to be beneficial and effective beyond the general information provided.ConclusionsThe results are discussed in terms of overcoming an inherent weakness in previous injury-related imagery research and the applied implications for the time-course of rehabilitation.     

Lady Liberty and Godfather Death as candidates for linguistic relativity? Scrutinizing the gender congruency effect on personified allegories with explicit and implicit measures

Linguistic relativity—the idea that language affects thought by way of its grammatical categorizations—has been controversially debated for decades. One of the contested cases is the grammatical gender of nouns, which is claimed to affect how their referents are conceptualized (i.e., as rather female or male in congruence with the grammatical gender of the noun), especially when used allegorically. But is this association strong enough to be detected in implicit measures, and, if so, can we disentangle effects of grammatical gender and allegorical association? Three experiments with native speakers of German tackled these questions. They revealed a gender congruency effect on allegorically used nouns, but this effect was stronger with an explicit measure (assignment of biological sex) than with an implicit measure (Extrinsic Affective Simon Task) and disappeared in the implicit measure when grammatical gender and allegorical associations were set into contrast. Taken together, these findings indicate that the observed congruency effect was driven by the association of nouns with personifications rather than by their grammatical gender. In conclusion, we also discuss implications of these findings for linguistic relativity.     

The coupling between spatial attention and other components of task-set: A task-switching investigation

Is spatial attention reconfigured independently of, or in tandem with, other task-set components when the task changes? We tracked the eyes of participants cued to perform one of three digit-classification tasks, each consistently associated with a distinct location. Previously we observed, on task switch trials, a substantial delay in orientation to the task-relevant location and tendency to fixate the location of the previously relevant task—“attentional inertia”. In the present experiments the cues specified (and instructions emphasized) the relevant location rather than the current task. In Experiment 1, with explicit spatial cues (arrows or spatial adverbs), the previously documented attentional handicaps all but disappeared, whilst the performance “switch cost” increased. Hence, attention can become decoupled from other aspects of task-set, but at a cost to the efficacy of task-set preparation. Experiment 2 used arbitrary single-letter cues with instructions and a training regime that encouraged participants to interpret the cue as indicating the relevant location rather than task. As in our previous experiments, and unlike in Experiment 1, we now observed clear switch-induced attentional delay and inertia, suggesting that the natural tendency is for spatial attention and task-set to be coupled and that only quasi-exogenous location cues decouple their reconfiguration.     

Enhanced encoding of the co-actor's target stimuli during a shared non-motor task

Task co-representation has been proposed to rely on the motor brain areas’ capacity to represent others’ action plans similarly to one's own. The joint memory (JM) effect suggests that working in parallel with others influences the depth of incidental encoding: Other-relevant items are better encoded than non-task-relevant items. Using this paradigm, we investigated whether task co-representation could also emerge for non-motor tasks. In Experiment 1, we found enhanced recall performance to stimuli relevant to the co-actor also when the participants’ task required non-motor responses (counting the target words) instead of key-presses. This suggests that the JM effect did not depend on simulating the co-actor's motor responses. In Experiment 2, direct visual access to the co-actor and his actions was found to be unnecessary to evoke the JM effect in case of the non-motor, but not in case of the motor task. Prior knowledge of the co-actor's target category is sufficient to evoke deeper incidental encoding. Overall, these findings indicate that the capacity of task co-representation extends beyond the realm of motor tasks: Simulating the other's motor actions is not necessary in this process.     

Development and validation of an in-competition emotion measure: The Brief In-Competition Emotion (BICE) scale

ObjectivesWe aimed to develop a concise psychometric scale to assess athletes’ in-competition emotions, which would reduce the practical and conceptual limitations of previous measures.DesignFour studies were designed to develop and assess the validity of the new Brief In-Competition Emotion (BICE) scale.MethodIn Study 1, the content validity of 39 emotion adjectives was investigated using expert analysis, 9 adjectives were subsequently removed. In Study 2, 402 university athletes used the remaining 30 adjectives to record their in-competition emotions and confirmatory factor analyses and a reliability removal method was used to create the 10-item BICE scale. Study 3 (N = 109) and Study 4 (N = 74) consisted of both concurrent and predictive validity assessments of the BICE scale.ResultsConstruct validity, reliability and confirmatory factor analyses completed during Study 1 and Study 2 resulted in the development of the 10-item BICE scale, consisting of five composite emotion factors: anger, anxiety, excitement, dejection and happiness. The findings from Study 3 and Study 4 showed that the BICE scale presented acceptable levels of concurrent and predictive validity.ConclusionsThe BICE scale is a rigorously developed parsimonious scale which offers researchers new opportunities for investigation and provides applied practitioners with a new method of evaluating in-competition intervention efficacies.     

Effet du télétravail sur la santé psychologique et la performance des travailleurs durant la pandémie de la Covid-19

The aim of this study was to examine how the widespread use of telework during the COVID-19 pandemic may have created a specific work context influencing employees’ psychological health and performance. Results of analyses conducted on a sample of 3771 Canadian teleworkers revealed that telework created additional demands such as task interdependence and professional isolation. These demands had negative effects on telework performance by increasing the frequency of perceived stress. However, the presence of resources such as organizational support appeared to play a buffering role in moderating the direct effect of professional isolation on telecommuting performance.     

How does the manipulation of time pressure during soccer tasks influence physical load and mental fatigue?

This study aimed to analyze whether having more or less time to solve soccer tasks influences physical load and mental fatigue. 48 semi-professional soccer players, from teams in national leagues participated (M_age = 22.4, SD_age = 2.25). They carried out 2 sessions with 4 tasks in each session. In one session, there was more time available; in the other, there was less time available. GPS technology was used to measure physical load, and an adaptation of NASA and Visual Analog Scale to measure mental load and mental fatigue. A related-samples T-test and magnitude based on inference were used to determine the possible effect. Soccer players reported that tasks with less available time were more mentally demanding. Moreover, less available time to solve the tasks significantly increased players’ RPE and decreased their Heart Rate and external physical load. Therefore, the available time significantly affects mental and physical load and mental fatigue.