Asian Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology最新文献

Dyadic interventions may promote physical activity (PA) amongst postpartum mothers. However, such interventions may not always be effective, and research is needed to explore the factors influencing engagement. Amongst this population, this study explores the perceived benefits, barriers to, and facilitators of a) PA participation, and b) engagement with two dyadic PA interventions. We conducted interviews with 17 postpartum mothers and 10 significant others (aged 26–61 years old). Data were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis. Barriers to PA engagement were that it was easy to set plans, but hard to carry them out due to childcare, work, studying/chores. Setting PA plans and receiving practical support from their partner were important ways to overcome barriers to being active, e.g., some participants looked after the children, so their partner could engage in PA, as a part of their plan. Feeling motivated to exercise as a family was also a facilitator of PA. Barriers to programme participation were a lack of motivation and a preference for exercise prescription. Perceived benefits of programme participation included increased PA commitment and accountability to the plans. Amongst other techniques, participants used prompts (e.g. spouse getting their children breakfast/coming home from work/their partner ‘checking in’), as a cue to start their PA plans. Findings show that tailored interventions to address the challenges of being a postpartum mother are needed; “one-size” fits all approach does not work.

This study examined stability and transitions of school-aged children's self-determination theory-based need satisfaction profiles in physical education (PE) over three years. Participants were 1121 (girls 573, boys 548) Finnish school children. The self-report data were assessed using identical procedures from 2017 to 2020. Three latent need satisfaction profiles were identified: Low, Mid, and High need satisfactions. Transitions mainly occurred between grade 5 and 6 in elementary school, after which the profile memberships remained relatively stable. The profile memberships were not school- or PE group dependent over time. These results indicate that school-based actions to achieve a positive impact on need satisfaction development could already be commenced in the early school years, as it may be more challenging to induce positive changes in student behaviours after children have transitioned to middle school.

Regular physical activity (PA) contributes to maintaining health and improving the quality of life among older people. This cross-sectional study investigates the associations between motivations derived from self-determination theory (SDT) and physical activity levels, as well as health-related fitness indices, in older Chinese women. We recruited 92 retired older women (range: 60–85 years; mean age ± SD: 71.74 ± 5.39 years) from Hong Kong, China. We assessed participants' motivations (autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and amotivation) using the Treatment Self-Regulation Questionnaire, and measured their moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity (MVPA) and weekly walking using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. We also evaluated body fat (fat mass, fat percentage, and visceral fat) using the Tanita SC240MA, flexibility with the Back Scratch Test and Chair Sit-and-Reach Test, and muscle strength using the Five-Times Sit-to-Stand Test and "Timed Up and Go" Test. We analyzed the data using partial-least squares structural equation modeling with Warp PLS 8.0 software. The results showed that autonomous motivation was significantly and positively related to walking (β = .24, p < .01) and MVPA (β = .23, p < .01); controlled motivation was negatively associated with walking (β = -.26, p < .01) and positively associated with MVPA (β = .21, p < .05); and amotivation was significantly and negatively associated with walking and MVPA (β = -.17, p <.05; β = -.16, p < .05). The results also generally suggest that a higher PA level is linked to better health-related fitness. However, the expected indirect effects of motivation on health-related fitness outcomes were not statistically significant. Our results support SDT in explaining older women's participation in physical activity. Although physically active older women were more likely to be physically fitter, motivation in physical activity did not exert significant indirect effects on all health-related fitness outcomes.

Regular participation in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity has been associated with adaptive physical and psychological health benefits including lower risk of non-communicable disease and reduced incidence of mental health conditions. However, a substantive majority the global population does not participate in sufficient physical activity to confer these health benefits, and inactivity levels are particularly high in underrepresented and disadvantaged minority groups, as indicated by negative associations between physical activity participation and socio-structural variables (e.g., socioeconomic status, income, education, health literacy). In addition, evidence suggests that participation in health behaviors such as physical activity partially mediates the association between these sociodemographic variables and health outcomes. We propose a process model specifying a candidate mechanism that may explain the association between socio-structural variables that represent disparity and health behaviors such as physical activity. Specifically, we propose a model in which beliefs such as attitudes, subjective norms, risk perceptions, and self-efficacy mediate associations between socio-structural variables and physical activity participation. After proposing the basic tenets of the model, we provide several examples illustrating the proposed effects for socio-structural variables including socioeconomic status and income, education, and health literacy in Asian contexts, and outline how these effects should be interpreted. We conclude by outlining the theoretical and practical relevance of these findings, and how they may inform interventions aimed at having adaptive effects on health outcomes by promoting physical activity participation and assisting in reducing health behavior disparities in Asian populations.

We review some topics in which soccer penalty kicks are related to phenomena in game theory, decision making and psychology. In particular, we discuss the game theoretic analysis of the kicker's and goalkeeper's behavior and its relation to the concept of mixed strategy Nash Equilibrium. The main idea is that both players should not follow a predictable strategy, and therefore should choose different strategies over time. We also review the action bias of goalkeepers in penalty kicks, which results in them almost always jumping to one of the sides although staying in the goal's center is in fact a good strategy given the empirical distribution of kicks. We then turn to the order effect in penalty shootouts, and the debate to what extent kicking first gives the team an advantage in the shootout. These topics illustrate the opportunities offered by interdisciplinary research that combines sports with social sciences such as economics and psychology. While this interdisciplinary literature has grown significantly in recent years, research opportunities in this area abound and we hope that this article will encourage the readers to contribute to it.

The literature on momentum (hot hand) is broad and diverse, and is addressed in a range of fields, including sports, marketing, finance, politics, and even warfare. Yet this term is readily (and often uncritically) borrowed across domains, to simply refer to serial dependency in data. As such, researchers may conveniently use the concept of momentum as a framework for study of streakiness in their given field, without specifying that each type of momentum differs greatly in terms of its underlying mechanisms (i.e., mediators). The field of judgment and decision-making (JDM) is an additional domain in which momentum has become a highly debated topic. In this paper, I consider the success-breeds-success phenomenon in sports competitions, and elaborate on three groups of mediators: (1) In biology, researchers are greatly interested in physiological responses to success in agnostic encounters (among both animals and humans), known as the winner effect; (2) In psychology, efficacy, motivation, concentration, and determination have been proposed as mediators of the success-breeds-success phenomenon; (3) In economics, according to game theory, early success in competitions can shift players’ net value of winning, namely, increasing or decreasing incentives for investing additional efforts. Based on these three theoretical perspectives, in this paper I advocate for the use of psychophysiological momentum with regards to sports competitions, while attempting to reconcile the longstanding debate about momentum that is seen in JDM-related literature.

Athletes act intentionally and adaptively for achieving task goals in sport performance environments. The ecological dynamics approach to decision making understands the performer‐environment system as the unit of analysis to understand behavior, where action is not just limited to processes occurring in the individual (e.g., information-processing theories) or in the environment (behaviorist approaches) but implies the close link between the two. In the present article we synthesize the key tenets of the ecological dynamics theoretical framework and describe how both individual and group decision-making in sport can be understood. We explain how behavior and decision-making are based upon self-organized processes, from which functional synergies emerge, paving the way for expert performance in individuals and groups. Specifically, considering group decision-making, we describe how team members are coordinated in the complex system that the team is. Finally, we suggest that the ecological dynamics approach is a well-suited framework to research individual and team cognition, with many applications to practice.

The ability to anticipate the actions of opponents is a significant marker of expertise in many sports. The role of non-kinematic contextual information in anticipation has received increasing attention over the last decade. In this article, we review contemporary research focusing on the specific impact of contextual information related to opponents’ action tendencies on anticipation in sport. This information can be acquired explicitly when probabilistic information about the preferences of the opponent is provided to the athlete before the action commences, or the athlete can pick up this information through exposure to the actions of the opponent. Regardless of how this information is acquired, it has been shown to influence anticipation performance and underlying processing priorities on a wide range of sport tasks. However, factors such as sport-specific expertise, informational reliability, task load, and judgment utility moderate these effects. We discuss methodological issues and gaps in existing knowledge and provide guidance for how to develop more representative research designs in future. Finally, we highlight practical implications that may help coaches and performance analysts in predicting the effectiveness of priming athletes with information about the action tendencies of opponents in various performance situations.