User:Zuleidaguirre/Sport psychology

= Sport psychology = Sport psychology was defined by the European Federation of Sport in 1996, as the study of the psychological basis, processes, and effects of sport. Otherwise, sport is considered as any physical activity where the individuals engage for competition and health. Sport psychology is recognized as an interdisciplinary science that draws on knowledge from many related fields including biomechanics, physiology, kinesiology and psychology. It involves the study of how psychological factors affect performance and how participation in sport and exercise affect psychological and physical factors. Sport psychologists teach cognitive and behavioral strategies to athletes in order to improve their experience and performance in sports. In addition to instruction and training of psychological skills for performance improvement, applied sport psychology may include work with athletes, coaches, and parents regarding injury, rehabilitation, communication, team building, and career transitions.

History of Sport Psychology
The field of sport psychology in general began in the 1960s with the formation of the International Society of Sport Psychology in 1965, The North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity in 1967, and The Canadian Society for Psychomotor Learning and Sport Psychology in 1969 .Sport psychology started in 1890 when Norman Triplett performed the first experiment in sport psychology and the social facilitation phenomenon. Then 1925 Coleman Griffith created the Athletic Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Later in 1930 the Soviet Union employed sport psychology during the Cold War. In 1960 sports psychology becomes part of the USA and expanded to the whole world. In 1986 the American Psychological Association recognized Sport psychology as a branch of Psychology and in 1993 British Psychology Society formed a sport and exercise psychology section.

Characteristics of Behavioral Sport Psychology
The first characteristic of behavioral sport psychology involves identifying target behaviors of athletes and/or coaches to be improved, defining those behaviors in a way so that they can be reliably measured, and using changes in the behavioral measure as the best indicator of the extent to which the recipient of an intervention is being helped (Martin, 2011).

A second characteristic is that behavioral psychology treatment procedures and techniques are based on the principles and procedures of Pavlovian (or respondent) and operant conditioning and are ways of rearranging the stimuli that occur as antecedents and consequences of an athlete’s behavior.

The third characteristic of behavioral sport psychology is that many of the interventions with athletes have been developed by practitioners with a cognitive–behavioral orientation. Cognitive–behavior therapy typically focuses on cognitive processes frequently referred to as believing, thinking, expecting, and perceiving.

The fourth characteristic of this approach is that researchers have relied heavily on the use of single-subject research designs to evaluate interventions in sport settings, including the following:

(a) a focus on individual athletic performance across several practices and/or competitions;

(b) acceptability by athletes and coaches because no control group is needed, few participants are needed, and sooner or later all participants receive the intervention;

(c) easy adaptability to assess a variety of interventions in practices and/or competitions; and

(d) effectiveness assessed through direct measures of sport-specific behaviors or outcomes of behaviors.

The fifth characteristic of a behavioral approach is to place a high value on accountability for everyone involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of an intervention (Martin & Pear, 2011).

Social validation in sports psychology
In ABA, the term social validation refers to procedures to ensure that the techniques employed by a practitioner are selected and applied in the best interests of the clients.

In behavioral sport psychology, social validation requires that the practitioner constantly seek answers to three questions: (a) What do the athletes (and perhaps the coach and parents) think about the goals of the intervention? (b) What do they think about the procedures recommended by the practitioner? (c) What do they think about the results produced by those procedures? Also, behavioral sport psychologists need to be aware of and behave consistently with the set of ethical principles to guide the actions of sport psychologists published in 1995 by the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology, which, in 2006, became the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP).

Skill acquisition
Each sport requires different range of skills. Knapp (1963) defined skills as the learned ability to bring pre-determined results with maximum certainty, often with the minimum outlay of time, energy or both. As we develop a skill, the error is diminished. An ability describes our innate physical attributes that determine our potential for a given sport.