Last week, I talked about motivation and athletic pursuits. This week, I’m going to delve a little further into my sports psychology textbook (see Sport Psychology: Concepts and Applications, 5th edition, Richard Cox) and think about the implications of personality and mood for athletes (and, of course, strength trainees).
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But first, let’s define personality and mood states
Before we get stuck in, let’s just be clear what we are talking about. Simply speaking, personality is the term we can use to describe a relatively permanent disposition that an athlete has to certain states of mind or emotions. Mood, or mood states, on the other hand, refers to far less permanent dispositions, that are typically situation-specific.
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So what can we say about personality and athletes?
That’s a good question
In fact, much has been written by sports psychologists on that very point. Sports psychologists are divided over whether personality can be used to predict athletic performance. Following an influential paper by William Morgan, the debate became polarised into those who believed that it could be done (the credulous) and those who believed that there was no correlation (the sceptical), see Morgan, Sports personology: the credulous-sceptical argument in perspective, in Straub (ed.) Sports personology: an analysis of athlete behaviour, 1980.
Morgan himself described himself as credulous and believed that the athlete was essentially an extrovert and displayed low levels of anxiety.
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What else?
Other researchers have made the following general observations about athletes:
- Athletes are more independent, objective and less anxious than non-athletes, see Schurr, Ashley and Joy, A multivariate analysis of male athlete characteristics: sport type and success, Multivariate Experimental Clinical Research, 1977
- Athletes are typical more intelligent than non-athletes, see Hardman, A dual approach to the study of personality and performance in sport, in Whiting, Hardman Hendry and Jones (eds.) Personality and Performance in Physical Education and Sport, 1973
- Athletes are more self-confident, competitive, and socially outgoing than non-athletes, see Cooper, Athletics, activity and personality: a review of the literature, Research Quarterly 40, 1969
Essentially, these traits are summarised by William Morgan’s thesis that athletes are extroverts and have low anxiety.
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That can’t be true across the board, surely?
Indeed, many of these studies were done on team sports players, who are required to show good social skills in forming relationships with each other and learning to predict each others’ performances. I suspect that these traits might be less important for individual sports.
In fact, without straining too hard, I can think of two quite prominent athletes in their own right, who were renowned for being quite reserved and solitary.
Doug Hepburn was certainly never the life and soul of the party and could hold his own as one of the strongest men who ever lived.
Graeme Obree was one of the most amazing cyclists who ever lived and his whole world view revolved around being more afraid of failure than of anything else in the world. Far from being low in anxiety, anxiety drove him to world-record breaking performances.
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What about different types of sport?
Interestingly, research into whether different athletic pursuits attracted athletes with differing personality traits was first done on bodybuilders. The thesis was that bodybuilders suffered from feelings of masculine inadequacy.
However, Thirer and Greer found that both intermediate and elite competitive bodybuilders were high in intrinsic motivation and did not display any such negative characteristics, see Thirer and Greer, Personality characteristics associated with beginning, intermediate and competitive bodybuilders, Journal of Sport Behaviour, 1981.
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Mood states
Remember that mood refers to situation-specific states of mind exhibited by athletes, because sports psychologists tend to talk about personality and mood in the same paper, if not the same sentence from time to time…
Profile of Mood States
The most commonly-used tool in sports psychology for measuring mood is called the Profile of Mood States or POMS. It was developed by the influential William Morgan referred to above.
Morgan believed that elite athletes frequently exhibited a mood profile that was lower in negative moods (tension/anxiety, depression, anger, fatigue and confusion) and higher in vigour. He believed that this was a more healthy mood profile than less successful athletes or the normal population and called it the Mental Health Model or MHM.
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Anxiety is the key to poor performance
Many researchers, including Morgan, have pointed to the idea that anxiety is often at the root of many surprisingly poor performances by athletes.
Anxiety is often defined across two different dimensions, trait vs. state and cognitive vs. somatic, as follows:
- Trait – trait anxiety is a personality trait whereby an athlete shows a predisposition to perceive certain situations as threatening. Where the trait s strong, it can result in the athlete displaying state anxiety frequently.
- State – state anxiety is the emotional state displayed by an athlete in response to their perception of a situation as threatening either to their person, their social standing or self-worth.
- Cognitive – cognitive anxiety is the thought process carried out by an athlete in evaluating a situation as threatening.
- Somatic – somatic anxiety is the the perception of internal physiological responses to the threatening situation by the athlete.
This matrix allows sports psychologists to begin to help athletes relieve their anxiety by attacking it at various different levels. For example, cognitive anxiety can be relieved by halting the negative appraisal and inserting positive appraisals instead. Similarly, somatic anxiety can be reduced through relaxation and calming measures.
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Causes of anxiety
Sports psychologists have identified several causes of anxiety, as follows:
- Fear of performance failure
- Fear of negative social evaluation
- Fear of physical harm
- Situational ambiguity (don’t know what to do)
- Disruption of routine
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I’m going to do a few posts on similar topics over the next couple of weeks and I’ll put them all on this sports psychology page.
