Asian Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology最新文献

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.

Referees in sport are required to have specific perceptual-cognitive skills in order to make correct and consistent decisions. The current article explores those skills and describes the literature regarding perceptual-cognitive skills and decision making of referees in association football. First, we describe the importance of perceptual-cognitive skills in sports including pattern recall and recognition, postural cue usage, and the ability to understand situational probabilities and anticipate future events. Second, we discuss the state of the art on perceptual-cognitive skills in officiating including the concept of accurate versus adequate decision making, talent development in refereeing, training opportunities, embodied officiating, and the use of video technology. Finally, we discuss several directions for future research using representative decision-making task designs, considering contextual and psychological information, implementing training studies, and applying a multifactorial and longitudinal approach.

Successful sports performance often requires choosing what to do and how to do it in dynamic, complex, and uncertain environments. Thus, an understanding of the processes underpinning judgment and decision making in sports (JDMS) is crucial for both researchers and applied practitioners. Despite the research developments, examining JDMS from several perspectives, there are still significant gaps in the knowledge of the processes involved. In this article we explore how the theoretical understanding of JDMS can be extended by acknowledging that cognition and action dynamics are intertwined, deploy in parallel, and influence each other bidirectionally. We present a holistic approach that integrates simple heuristics and embodied cognition to explain JDMS. Importantly, our aim is not to devalue previous JDMS theories but rather to exemplify how embodied choices can redirect the current interpretation of judgment and decision-making processes in sports. Taking this embodied choice perspective, we reinterpret the findings of four prototypical research papers on JDMS, each representing one of the most influential perspectives in JDMS (i.e., the economic, social cognition, cognitive, and ecological dynamics approaches). Last, we discuss future directions for JDMS research from an embodied choice perspective.

The current article aims to advance the use of complexity theory and organizational-level analyses in the psychology of sport literature. Consistent with this premise, it presents a case-study that utilizes the logic and the terminology of complexity theory to explain a chronology of destructive decision making at Hapoel Tel Aviv, a prominent football club in the Israeli Super League. Using a qualitative research strategy, the study relates the financial crisis and the professional failure of the club between 2015 and 2017 to the shortcoming of owners, managers and active fans in coping with complexity. Specifically, the findings highlight three mismanaged organizational inconsistencies referred to as the “order-disorder”, the “love-hate” and the “strong-weak” paradoxes. The analysis illustrates the role of complexity in shaping the psychological dynamics of making decisions in sport organizations.

In a seminal article (Plessner & Haar, 2006) a social cognition approach was proposed as framework to study how people judge their own or others’ performance in competitive sport contexts. An important goal of this work was to better understand the processes that underlie potential biases in judgments of sports performance and, thus, receive some hints on how to prevent them. Numerous studies have since been published in which judgments of sports performance have been subjected to scientific analysis. The present paper provides an updated overview on related research from the past 15 years. Again, it follows central building blocks of social information processing (i.e., information input, rules of information integration, situational influences, and characteristics/states of the judging person). Additionally, we organize this overview according to whether the research addresses judgments typically performed by athletes, officials, managers/coaches, or observers. On the one hand, it becomes clear that not all possible combinations of judging persons and information processes are addressed to the same extent in research, which opens up a number of future research tasks. On the other hand, it is suggested that future research in this area should not only be developed broadly, but also that the goal of further theoretical development should not be lost sight of.

This study investigated effects of mindfulness training on resilience, self-confidence and emotion regulation of elite football players as well as mediating role of locus of control. The study recruited 34 participants which were assigned into experimental (n=17) and control (n=17) groups. Age ranged between 16 and 32years (M age = 22.6years, SD = 1.47). The experimental group received 8 weeks mindfulness acceptance commitment (MAC) intervention program, while control group received no intervention. Participants completed Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), The Connor-Davidson Resilience scale (CD-RISC), Trait Sport Confidence Inventory (TSCI), Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) and Adapted Levenson Multidimensional Locus of control scales (ALMLC). Both groups completed the questionnaire at pre-test and post-test evaluation. Descriptive data employed mean and standard deviation, while Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) of Sӧrbom's method (alternative to analysis of covariance) was used for analysis of hypothesis. Finding of the study showed that there is significant direct and indirect effect of mindfulness acceptance commitment on resilience, self-confidence and emotion regulation on elite football players. The findings further showed that there is significant difference between the pre-test scores and post-test scores of intervention group and control group. The intervention group mean scores on resilience, self-confidence and emotion regulation are higher than the control group counterparts. This shows that MAC program is effective in increasing resilience, self-confidence and emotion regulation of elite football players concurrently which in turn could improve performance and attain success.