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Summary: In sport performance, patterns in perceptions, actions, intentions, ideas, feelings, and thoughts continuously emerge under environmental, task, and personal constraints. This chapter summarizes advances in ecological dynamics and discusses their implications for sport psychologists. Key concepts in ecological dynamics capture the nature of skill to regulate athlete performance behaviors in sport contexts, with clear implications for understanding performers and the learning process in preparation for performance. Viewing the role of cognition, perception, and action in sport performance from this perspective provides a principled, integrated systems focus on athlete behaviors for sport psychology practice. Emotions play a significant role in regulating behaviors that emerge in sports performance contexts as well as influencing learning experiences. The key principles of ALD will be valuable in the design of skill acquisition programs in athlete development from junior to senior levels. [Publisher's website]

This chapter focuses on a specific team process, namely team mental models (TMM), which has been the subject of extensive theoretical and empirical work in sport, exercise, and performance psychology in particular, and applied psychology at large. It explains the terminology and provides an operational definition of TMM. The chapter discusses the reflective indicators of TMM and comment on its formative function on team coordination. It proposes a descriptive conceptual taxonomy to inform research and also provides general recommendations on how to measure mental representations at the team‐level of analysis. The chapter reviews the theoretical roots and presents empirical evidence supporting the theorem of TMM. In the nomo‐logical network section, it also discusses the reciprocal linkage of TMM with other team processes and team outcomes. The chapter presents applied recommendations focusing on how to improve team dynamics through social means and concludes with a summary and outlook of future research perspectives.

Pattern recognition and recall paradigms are the concepts, theories, and methods that are typically used to examine and explain the underlying mechanisms contributing to the capability of performers to recognize and/or recall information from their domain. A vast amount of evidence has demonstrated that experienced performers are better than novices at recalling the locations of “elements” (i.e., the individual items that comprise a pattern) from a pattern that is presented for only a relatively brief period of time. Similarly, experienced performers can also recognize a previously seen pattern from among previously unseen patterns with accuracy that surpasses lesser-skilled individuals. The theoretical explanations surrounding these attributes are important for helping better understand the methods in which experts (including expert sportspeople) from a range of domains utilize perceptual information as well as assisting in the design and implementation of practical applications for enhancing the perceptual– cognitive skills of lesser-skilled individuals. This entry provides information on the basic theoretical principles used to explain experts’ superiority in pattern recognition and recall tasks. Much of this theorizing has arisen from outside the classical sport domain in other domains such as chess...

Perfectionism is a personality disposition characterized by striving for flawlessness and setting exceedingly high standards for performance, accompanied by tendencies for overly critical evaluations. It is a disposition that may pervade all areas of life, particularly areas in which performance plays as major role (e.g., work, school). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that perfectionism is a common characteristic in competitive athletes.

This investigation had two purposes. The first purpose was to partially replicate the Gould, Eklund and Jackson (1990) investigation of psychological factors associated with best and worst matches of 1988 U.S. Olympic wrestlers with a sample of collegiate wrestlers. The second purpose of this investigation was to extend these and other cross-sectional or episodic findings by following the collegiate wrestlers longitudinally to examine an array of performance levels. Qualitative data were collected from seven NCAA Division I wrestlers via in-depth retrospective interviews concerning all-time best and worst performances as well as four to eight season performances. These data were analyzed according to the general recommendations of Scanlan, Ravizza and Stein (1989) and Gould et al. (1990) including the use of consensual validation. Five dimensions or general issues emerged in this data as salient. These included affect, focus, cognitive content, confidence issues, and sources of motivation.