So I wrote yesterday about personality and mood insofar as it relates to athletes and trainees.
During that article, I referred to the Mental Health Model of athletic performance, which is a popular theory that states that an inverse relationship exists between psychopathology and sport performance. The model suggests that as an athlete’s mental health either worsens or improves performance should either fall or rise accordingly.
As I noted yesterday, the important thing to note is that this model affects both discussions of personality and mood. The model is used to predict success between people, according to their mental health, and to predict success for a single athlete, depending on their mood on a given day.
But before we look at some research, I have to say that I am sceptical. I think there is a lot of mileage in this idea for team sports players but I think that a certain amount of OCD and anti-social behaviour is probably a benefit for a solo athlete, where dedicated training, obsession and single-mindedness are likely quite key factors in creating a world-class performer.
***
Looking more closely at the Mental Health Model
To take our discussion of the Mental Health Model a little further, I’d like to take a quick look at a discussion article, Psychological Factors in Sports Performance: The Mental Health Model Revisited, Raglin, Sports Medicine, 2001.
In this article, John Raglin performs a great review of the literature surrounding the model. He explains the beginnings of the idea that psychology has an impact on sports performance. He details the early discussions that started as early as the late 1800′s and he covers the general themes, that continually suggest the importance of extraversion and emotional stability for the athlete.
Raglin picks out the following interesting conclusions from research into the Mental Health Model over the years:
- The original study – Raglin notes that in the original study, Morgan found that successful athletes possessed mean scores on psychological measures that indicated better mental health than their peers, including mood state and emotional stability. They scored low on factors including tension (anxiety), depression, anger, fatigue and confusion and high on vigour.
- Response distortion – one of the problems with doing research of this kind is that athletes often answer the test questions in a way so as to appear well (socially desirable) rather than honestly. This is called “response distortion” and questions were developed to identify whether an athlete was engaged in this kind of practice. Ironically, it transpired in some studies that this was the single most effective variable at identifying successful and unsuccessful athletes (Spotting success traits in Olympic contenders, Phys Sports Medicine, 1975). It is possible that the trait that makes people want to be socially desirable may increase stress and cortisol levels and therefore decrease performance.
- Intraversion and extraversion – many studies have pointed to the benefits of extraversion. Raglin explores this issue and notes that the absence of intraversion seems to be more important than the presence of extreme extraversion. This may be on account of the more desirable coping strategies used by extraverts than by intraverts. However, there is also evidence that intraverts have higher rates of perceived exertion than extraverts, which makes training less effective.
***
So what is interesting about all this research?
I think the following points are very interesting:
- Anger – many people consider that anger is a powerful driver in sports performance but this model suggests that this may not be the case.
- Social desirability – how many people do you know who are desperate to fit in but never achieve anything? Quite a few, I imagine. The above research suggests that athletes who rank highly for wanting to fit in are typically unsuccessful.
- Perceived exertion – if you are an intravert, it might be worth sense checking to see whether you are working as hard as you think you are in the gym. You might find that with some encouragement, you can lift heavier than you think you can.
Do these points pass the “experience test”? I know people for whom they would ring very true. On the other hand, I know that there are lifts that I can influence strongly by getting angry. Please let me know if you have any experience of these points in the comments.
***
I’m going to do a couple of research reviews on similar sports psychology topics and I’ll put them up on this sports psychology research page.
