Introduction This essay is about mental skills, and how applying these skills can help an athlete. The name of the questionnaire is the Mental Skills Assessment Questionnaire, which measures the various mental skills which an athlete can develop, and the objective is to identify and discuss the issues which the athlete is experiencing using relevant theories, as well as recommending solutions to address them. The subject of this essay is Lulu, a female tennis player who is 20 years old from Republic Polytechnic. The questionnaire is administered during lunch time in school, on 3 January 2017. According to the results of the questionnaire, the three main psychological areas Lulu requires help with are; attention, anxiety, and motivation. Discussion …show more content…
Anxiety can be further broken down into state and trait anxiety. State anxiety is the changes in feelings of nervousness at a particular moment. Trait anxiety is the natural predisposition where one frequently experience high anxiety, even in non-threatening situations (Weinberg & Gould, 1995). Depending on the sport and the athlete, a certain optimal level of anxiety and arousal is required for optimal sports performance. If anxiety or arousal is beyond optimal, one may experience choking, resulting in decreased performance. If arousal is too low, one might not be motivated enough to give their best. Theories relating to anxiety are; Drive theory, Inverted-U hypothesis, Individualized Zones of Optimal Functioning, Multidimensional anxiety theory, Catastrophe model, and Reversal …show more content…
We will be discussing concentration here. In the area of concentration, Lulu scored 6, 7, 7, 7 on questions 17, 18, 19, and 20 respectively. Thus, it is clear that Lulu has trouble in this area as she is distracted easily by external noise and irrelevant thoughts during competitions. Concentration is the ability to perform with a clear and present focus (Vernacchia, 2003). Focus is the central point of one’s attention. Attention is what an individual is observing. Selective attention is the ability of athletes to focus on certain cues to the exclusion of others (Wrisberg and Shea, 1978). Conscious attention is the deliberate act of focusing on a specific task, while unconscious attention is having focus in a task without conscious effort (Nideffer, 1995; Schiffrin and Schneider, 1997; Wegner, 1994). High performing athletes usually showcase unconscious attention in sports, as they are able to perform naturally without much thought or effort instantaneously due to the fact that all the effort had already been put in through training. If an athlete has to consciously pay attention during a game, performance will be sub-par as compared to reacting with instinct naturally with unconscious
A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
William James, an American psychologist, proposed the first theory of what we now call “selective attention”. Selective attention is the assumption that in order to focus on one activity going on in your environment, you must hinder all other tasks occurring in the background. A good illustration of this would be to block out the music playing for the sake of progress on school work. This is referred to as the spotlight theory. In premise, your visual attention works like a spotlight. There is a focal point, or place or concentration. Beyond the focal point is considered to be fringe; seen by the viewer, but not observed clearly. Outside of the focal point and fringe is surplus and not viewed at all (Cherry, 2014).
There are two types of anxiety; state anxiety and trait anxiety. Trait anxiety is a persistent trait. It is always present and causes the person who has it to always have a sense that something horrible is about to happen. State anxiety is temporary. It is caused by different, specific situations.
Anxiety disorders are very common and the causes vary. Symptoms of anxiety disorders can be disabling for some but in most cases people who suffer with it can still carry on social relationships and job functions. There are medical outlets a patient can seek to help cope and treat anxiety through biological treatment and psychotherapy. The authors of “Anxiety Reactivity and Anxiety Perseveration Represent Dissociable Dimensions of Trait Anxiety” focused on anxiety vulnerability by testing and measuring reactivity and preservation in regard to anxiety. (Rudaizky, page, MacLeod 2012).
Athletes train for weeks, months, or even years for one single event in their sport. They are relentless in their workouts and strength training. They go out and show what they can do for everyone to see. But is there more to it than what the eye can see? Mindfulness is a word used to describe one’s mental strength and concentration. Mindfulness is defined as “state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you carefully observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to your current experience, rather than dwelling on the past or anticipating the future.” (Mindfulness). This is becoming a highly discussed practice used by many successful athletes. Lebron James has sworn by meditation before games or high pressure situations, along with Derek Jeter, and Olympic beach volleyball partners Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings. They are only a few of
Anxiety is a monster that most people have to deal with on a daily basis. Even though anxiety is not actually a monster it still torments thousands of people every day, leaving them weak and scared. Anxiety defined means “distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune” defined by Dictionary.com. In the epic poem of Beowulf, one could say that the townspeople had anxiety when it came to Grendel because they feared what he could do to them.
Mathews, A. Macleod, C. (2002). Induced processing biases have causal effects on anxiety. Cognition & Emotion.. 3 (16), p331-354.
The reasons that previous research on this subject has been hard to synthesize is because of numerous reasons, those including ‘methodological flaws’ such as lack of clear definitions and also lack of clear ‘theoretical construct.’ In the following section terms will be established for words that will be throughout this paper. Also, this section will provide an overview of theories that have been used to clarify the relationship between anxiety and performance in athletes.
Attention is defined as “notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important”.
Once athletes get their mind and body working together, strange, almost superhuman things can happen. Some athletes claim
...ompetition environment. There is increasing recognition by the sports community that supporting athlete mental health is a vital aspect of competitive performance, and is as integral to success as the athlete’s physical abilities. The profession of sports psychology provides a very meaningful contribution to help facilitate athlete wellbeing and maximize the psychological skills required to compete at the highest level of competition.
The class in which the observations took place was a Year One and Two class with twenty six pupils in the class. Adults within the class were the Teacher, one Teaching Assistant with the occasional help of a Special Needs Assistant. Confidentiality is important within the classroom setting therefore to respect the individuals own confidentiality they will be known as Child J throughout this assignment. Child J is a male aged five years and three months. It was decided that the observations of the individual would be about concentration, as the Teacher was concerned that J does not have the ability to concentrate for more than five minutes at a time. The observations will be noted and taken further if it is felt that it will be beneficial to the child’s education.
Sports and performance anxiety often go hand-in-hand. When a competitor ‘freezes’ in the big moment or commits an inexplicable error, anxiety, in one of its many guises, is very often the root cause. Anxiety is a natural reaction to threats in the environment and part of the preparation
Attention refers to the state of applying the mind into specific information currently seen in our surroundings. W. James defines attention as the clasp possession of the mind which can do several coincidentally possible objects or train of thoughts. It also suggests recession from some things in order to handle with others effectively (Cherry, n.d.).
The phenomenon of ‘Divided attention’ is the idea that an individual has the ability to divide their attention between two or more tasks (multi- tasking). Focused attention models such as Broadbent’s theory, Treisman’s theory and Deutsch and Deutsch model explains how all our inputs are focused on one task at a time, however it is clear from looking at everyday life that we are able to divide our attention, successfully being able to complete more than one task at the same time.