In the Mind's Eye Enhancing Human Performance (1991) / Chapter Skim
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11 Optimizing Individual Performance One of the long-standing concerns of sports psychology has been an understanding of performance under pressure. Unlike the military, the "pressure" in a sport is not usually intended to put someone at risk of life and limb.
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speaking, Morgan's model may not seem very provocative, but its common sense and intuitive appeal has advantages in its gaining acceptance among the public (see Morgan, 1980)
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1968, which measures extroversion, neuroticism, and conformity; the Somatic Perception Questionnaire (SPQ) (Landy and Stern, 1971)
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FIGURE 2 Comparison of profile of mood states of athletes and college student norms. which the performances occurred (Morgan et al., 1987a)
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a control group. Instead, these studies simply plotted the means of a single group of athletes and contrasted them to the normative sample reported in the POMS test manual (McNair et al., 1971/1981)
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social desirability and other response sets, inadequate self-insight, and item transparency affect POMS scores. Miller and Edgington (1984)
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different conditions of situationally induced pressure brought about by manipulating the training stimulus. This section reviews studies examining this dynamic mental health model.
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POMS scale at 1-month intervals from September (training load at approximately 3,000 yards/day) to the peak training load in January (11,000 yards/day)
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FIGURE 3 Moods of student athletes and nonathletes. studies, the training volume of the swimmers increased from 2,000 yards/day in September (baseline)
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period of increased training. The fact that tension remained elevated following the taper period may have been due to anxiety associated with an impending conference championship.
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performance. The performance measure employed represented an outcome, such as won or lost, made or didn't make the team; but an athlete might have performed very well relative to his or her past performance (e.g., personal best)
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strategies (e.g., modeling)
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al.
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TABLE 2 Comparative Effects of Physical and Mental Practice Hird et al.
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organized basis, and in which performance (the dependent variable) was measured in a noncontrived competitive situation in the sport in which the athletes regularly competed.
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preparation of Olympic athletes, it later became clear that Morgan's remarks were being addressed to the dearth of intervention studies on elite athletes. But of four studies with elite athletes, 75 percent show positive effects of cognitivebehavioral interventions on sports performance.
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combined with imagery or modeling) , three of the five studies (Hall and Erffmeyer, 1983; Lee and Hewitt, 1987; Weinberg et al., 1981)
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can become more standardized; assessment of nontargeted areas (e.g., cognitive changes) in addition to the targeted performance components; and follow-up assessments to determine the long-term effects of different psychological interventions on athletes performing in competitive situations.
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students with limited tennis playing experience were compared in a pretestposttest design on their form and accuracy in the tennis serve. In the first experiment, there were the following four groups: a Sybervision tape of Stan Smith (12 subjects)
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from the error recognition data since, with the measure used, even the judges had trouble identifying errors.) Finally, no one group had significantly better form than any other group, although the effect sizes for the Sybervision plus imagery group (1.48)
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recognized. In sports, simple as well as complex techniques that provide feedback about one's own performance are becoming increasingly more popular.
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Unlike most of the motor performance laboratory studies on mental practice, in which subjects are randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions, the military studies used intact groups. The use of intact groups raises a risk that variables other than the one of interest (i.e., independent variable)
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scientifically demonstrated under altered operational conditions, it can then be decided whether the effect is beneficial enough to suggest incorporation into the operational routine. Summary The sports psychology literature convincingly shows that cognitivebehavioral techniques can produce small to moderate improvements in various types of motor performance.
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few seconds preceding the execution of a motor skill are critical for successful performance (Gould et al., 1980; Mahoney and Avener, 1977; Suinn, 1977)
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The positive physical response stage begins immediately following the scoring of a point and lasts 3-5 seconds. According to Loehr, mentally tough athletes maintain their composure and display a strong, fighting, positive physical image.
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routine has been used, there are no scientific studies that have examined its effectiveness. The crucial question is whether those using structured preperformance routines perform better than those who do not use them.
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improvements in performance for three subjects. This study, however, used very few observations (2-8 rounds of nine-hole play)
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the ones that have produced the most consistent results during athletes' preperformance routines in the sports of archery, rifle shooting, and golf putting have been measures of cardiac deceleration and spontaneous EEG activity. Cardiac Deceleration Stimuli of various types produce a pattern of beat-by-beat cardiac acceleration or deceleration in the 3-5 seconds prior to a response.
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task used to create the intake-rejection situation. In 1963, Lacey et al.
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shooters" had greater cardiac deceleration than "cognitive shooters" 14 The degree to which cardiac deceleration differences noted between novice and experienced performers are associated with learning the task has been investigated in archers. The archers experienced a 62 percent increase in performance over a 12-week period in which they had received 27 sessions of archery training (35 hours total)
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the shot, cardiac deceleration was associated with increased alpha activity in the left hemisphere while right alpha remained constant. Hatfield et al.
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(i.e., greater right hemisphere low-frequency activity) , and a no feedback control group.
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EXERCISE AND STRESS The relationship between aerobic fitness and psychological well-being is an area within the field of exercise and sports psychology that has received considerable attention in the last 5 years. Research interest among exercise scientists on such topics as depression, anxiety, sleep, and reactivity to psychosocial stressors has intensified with the recognition that the life-styles of millions of Americans are disrupted due to anxiety and depression (Dishman, 1982; Morgan, 1979)
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in these studies included systolic and diastolic blood pressure, skin response, hormonal, muscle activity, and psychological self-report. For the 1,449 subjects, the meta-analytic results showed an overall effect size of 0.48 (Crews and Landers, 1987)
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and mastery; (2) serving as a defense mechanism to help people forget about their distress so as to decrease anxiety; (3)
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One conclusion that is supported by considerable empirical data is that significant behavioral and performance enhancements can be achieved under certain conditions. While this conclusion may seem obvious to most readers, it should be remembered that behavioral constructs earlier in this century maintained that many behavioral properties were "fixed" entities, resulting from static physiological features.
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motor cortex, premotor cortex, parietal opercula, paracentral cortex, putamen, caudate, and thalamus. Using position emission tomography, regional cerebral blood flow, and other oxygen and glucose metabolic imaging methods, numerous studies show that even heavily overlearned tasks, such as handwriting, result in bilateral metabolic increases in many subcortical regions, especially in the striatum (Mazziotta and Phelps, 1984)
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of the individuals who possessed the virtues or qualities of the self-actualizing personality and by the states these individuals recalled during their best moments. The concept of peak performance in sports was popularized in the self-help work of Garfield (1978)
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eye" of task requirements; an unself-conscious absorption in the task at hand; an uncommon intrinsic motivation, which is an absence of goal states in which the subject is performing for external rewards, trophies, financial rewards, or even social approval; a strong sense of purpose (appropriate striving) ; a total commitment of the "project" in which the subject controls the contents of his or her consciousness and allows no room for distraction; a feeling of exercising control; a stretching of talents to match environmental challenges; a time transformational experience, which is most often characterized by time being slowed down but also can include a sense of accelerated temporal distortion; a sense of order in cognitive and motor set schemata; no wasted psychic or physical energy (or entropy)
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individuals who have succeeded in spite of hostile internal and external psychological environments, such as in the examples of Bettelheim (1960) and Frankl (1963)
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They contribute to the development of a broader framework to guide the research. CONCLUSIONS Mental Health and Athletic Success The mental health model has produced inconsistent results in differentiating successful athletes from less successful athletes in terms of individual mood scales.
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Exercise and Stress Aerobic exercise is related to reduced physiological and psychological response and quicker recovery from psychosocial stressors. Neuroscience and Peak Performance Further understanding of the bases for performance is likely to come from ongoing research in neuroscience and on "peak performance." Recent neuroscientific studies using imaging techniques have shown that even simple motor processes have complex neurophysiological correlates.
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7. Although these findings could be overestimated without unpublished studies, the likelihood of unpublished studies substantially reducing an effect size of 0.62 is not great.
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Annett, J 1979 Memory for skill.
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Craighead, D.J., G Privette, F
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Elliott, R 1972 The significance of heart rate for behavior: a critique of Lacey's hypothesis.
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Greenspan, M.J., and D.L. Feltz 1989 Psychological interventions with athletes in competitive situations: a review.
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Kim, G.B. 1989 Relative effectiveness of anxiety reduction techniques on levels of competitive anxiety and shooting performance.
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Landers, D.M., S.H. Petruzzello, W
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Mazziotta, J., and M Phelps 1984 Positron computed tomography studies of cerebral metabolic responses to complex motor tasks.
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Morrison, J.E., and S.A. Walker 1990 Effects of Mental Practice on Tank Gunnery Performance.
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Raven, P.B., D Rohm-Young, and C.G.
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Singer, R.N., L.A. Flora, and T.L.
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Wilson, V.E., N.C. Morley, and E.I.
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