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Objectives: There has been considerable inconsistency and confusion in the definition of elite/expert athletes in sport psychology research, which has implications for studies conducted in this area and for the field as a whole. This study aimed to: (i) critically evaluate the ways in which recent research in sport psychology has defined elite/expert athletes; (ii) explore the rationale for using such athletes; and (iii) evaluate the conclusions that research in this field draws about the nature of expertise. Design: Conventional systematic review principles were employed to conduct a rigorous search and synthesise findings. Methods: A comprehensive literature search of SPORTDiscus, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES and Academic Search Complete was completed in September, 2013 which yielded 91 empirical studies published between 2010 and 2013. The primarily qualitative findings were analysed thematically. Results: Eight ways of defining elite/expert athletes were identified, ranging from Olympic champions to regional level competitors and those with as little as two years of experience in their sport. Three types of rationale were evident in these studies (i.e., 'necessity', 'exploratory' and 'superior'); while findings also indicated that some elite athletes are psychologically idiosyncratic and perhaps even dysfunctional in their behaviour. Finally, only 19 of the 91 included studies provided conclusions about the nature of expertise in sport. Conclusions: This study suggests that the definitions of elite athletes vary on a continuum of validity, and the findings are translated into a taxonomy for classifying expert samples in sport psychology research in future. Recommendations are provided for researchers in this area. Author has checked copyright

The purpose of this study was to provide an ecologically valid account of the experiences of ‘admitted dopers’. In-depth interviews were conducted with five elite athletes from the sports of road cycling, mountain biking and weightlifting. The athletes had either tested positive for banned substances or had admitted to prior drug use after their retirement from competitive sport. Thematic analysis was used to extract meaning from the interview data. Individual psychological factors and contextual influences on the athletes' doping decisions were identified. The conflicting responses of these athletes make the identification of a psychological profile of athletes most at-risk for doping difficult, but morality was consistently cited as an important consideration. The culture of the athletes' team or training group and ‘critical incidents’ during the athletes' careers were often influential in precipitating drug use. Doping deterrents were also discussed, of which guilt and shame were predominant. The athle...

Researchers have suggested that skill performance deteriorates when people try to exert conscious control over automatic actions. Unfortunately, little is known about the effects of different types of conscious processing on skilled performance by expert athletes. We conducted two experiments to address this issue. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of a specific form of conscious control (making technical adjustments to a stroke) on the putting skills of expert golfers. The expert golfers maintained putting proficiency (i.e. number of putts holed) when making technical adjustments. However, this form of conscious processing altered the timing and consistency of golfers' putting strokes. Experiment 2 compared the influence of technical adjustments and conscious monitoring (paying attention to the execution of the stroke) on expert golfers' putting skills. Technical adjustments had no disruptive influence on expert golfers' putting proficiency but did reduce the consistency of their strokes. However, conscious monitoring was found to impair putting proficiency. The implications of the work for theory and future work are discussed.

This study investigated the factors perceived by 191 international athletes to have either facilitated or inhibited their development and success. Using Carlson’s (1993) framework as a reference point, the athlete’s ‘microsystem’ (i.e., supportive roles, activities and interpersonal relationships) was the site of the strongest positive factors in the eyes of these elite performers. These microsystem factors included family, friends and coaches. Consistent with Carlson’s ecological perspective, the personal attributes of the athletes were perceived to be central to maximizing their talent and responding to their environment and circumstances. A key implication of these findings is that if success is to be achieved, athletes require strong personal motivation and a supportive microsystem, particularly in the early and middle stages of development. As the athlete progresses, the need for wider, system-based support becomes apparent so that the sporting, financial and personal challenges associated w...

Creatine is a nutritional supplement that is commonly, if controversially, used as an ergogenic aid in sport. The aim of the present study was to examine the prevalence, use and knowledge of this substance among a sample of elite Gaelic football, rugby, and soccer players in Ireland. 460 male athletes completed an anonymous self-report questionnaire that examined their use and knowledge of creatine. Overall, 18.9% of the sample (n = 87) had not heard of creatine, 56.7% (n = 261) reported that they had heard of it but had never used it, a further 16.3% (n = 75) had used creatine in the past but were no longer doing so and 5.2% (n = 24) were currently using it. Further analysis showed some differences in patterns of use among those who had heard of creatine. In general, although there were more users at adult level than at school level, there was no difference in percentage of users across sport types. However, when school and adult players were examined separately, there were significantly more users in rugby at the adult level. The data indicate a higher awareness of this substance among adult rugby players than among players of other sports tested in the sample.

This study investigated the relationship of controllability of mental imagery with canoe-slalom performance. Controllability of mental imagery was assessed by an objective test of mental rotation, the Mental Rotations Test. This test was administered to both elite ( n = 19) and intermediate ( n = 12) athletes. Predictive validity of the controllability test was supported by a significant correlation between test scores and race rank order for the elite canoeing group ( rs = 0.42, p29 = 0.98, p>.05). Researchers should attempt to evaluate vividness of imagery, controllability of imagery, and accuracy of reference to understand more fully the nature of athletes' imagery.

A key postulate of traditional theories of motor skill-learning (e.g., Fitts and Posner, 1967; Shiffrin and Schneider, 1977) is that expert performance is largely automatic in nature and tends to deteriorate when the performer 'reinvests' in, or attempts to exert conscious control over, proceduralized movements (Masters and Maxwell, 2008). This postulate is challenged, however, by recent empirical evidence (e.g., Nyberg, in press; Geeves et al., 2014) which shows that conscious cognitive activity plays a key role in facilitating further improvement amongst expert sports performers and musicians – people who have already achieved elite status (Toner and Moran, in press). This evidence suggests that expert performers in motor domains (e.g., sport, music) can strategically deploy conscious attention to alternate between different modes of bodily awareness (reflective and pre-reflective) during performance. Extrapolating from this phenomenon, the current paper considers how a novel theoretical approach (adapted from Sutton et al., 2011) could help researchers to elucidate some of the cognitive mechanisms mediating continuous improvement amongst expert performers. Author has checked copyright

Recent years have witnessed increased research interest from psychologists in constructs which describe individual differences among athletes in their choice of cognitive strategies in competitive situations. Two such constructs are ‘explanatory style’ (or the typical manner in which people seek to explain the events that they experience) and ‘attentional style’ (or their characteristic preference for certain concentration strategies). The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the relationship between these stylistic constructs and athletic performance. Following a review of relevant trends and issues in research on this topic, a case study is presented in which the preferred attentional strategies of marathon runners are explored. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the empirical and theoretical benefits for psychology which arise from the study of cognitive style constructs in sport performers.

Sporting prowess has been venerated in Ireland for over a thousand years yet despite the ancient respect for athleticism, ‘sport psychology’, or the application of psychological principles and techniques to sport settings, represents a relatively recent development in Ireland. What is more, relatively little is known aboutthe mental skills of Irish sport performers or their use of mental skills training. In an effort to rectify this oversight, the present paper traces the rise of sport psychology in Ireland and reports the results of a testing programme in which the mental skills of a large sample N = 456) of Irish athletes were profiled using the ‘Psychological Skills Inventory for Sports (PSIS-R5; Mahoney, 1989).

Mental imagery. or the capacity to represent cognitively experiences of things which are not physically present. is used extensively by athletes in an effort to enhance their skills and to improve their performance in competitive settings. However. research on imagery in sport has largely neglected two questions. First. what effect does imagery training have on the performance of elite athletes? Second. does imagery training facilitate the acquisition of complex sport skills in field settings? In order to address these questions. the present study used a single-case design to evaluate the efficacy of an imagery-based intervention procedure in improving the performance of the ‘freestyle turn’ in swimming. Four expert swimmers (two males and two females) participated in this study. These swimmers (aged between 16 and 17 years) were recruited from the Irish international swimming squad. Using a multiple-baseline-across-individuals design. a specially prepared imagery intervention was introduced after pre-tre...

Part 1: Introducing Sport and Exercise Psychology Introducing Sport and Exercise Psychology: Discipline and Profession Part 2: Exploring Athletic Performance: Key Constructs Motivation and Goal-Setting in Sport. "Psyching Up" and Calming Down: Anxiety in Sport. Staying Focused in Sport: Concentration in Sport Performers. Using Imagination in Sport: Mental Imagery and Mental Practice in Athletes. What Lies Beneath the Surface? Investigating Expertise in Sport Part 3: Team Cohesion Exploring Team Cohesion in Sport: A Critical Perspective Part 4: Exploring Health, Exercise and Injury Does a Healthy Body Always Lead to a Healthy Mind? Exploring Exercise Psychology. Helping Athletes to Cope with Injury: From Theory to Practice

Historically, cognitive researchers have largely ignored the domain of sport in their quest to understand how the mind works. This neglect is due, in part, to the limitations of the information processing paradigm that dominated cognitive psychology in its formative years. With the emergence of the embodiment approach to cognition, however, sport has become a dynamic natural laboratory in which to investigate the relationship between thinking and skilled action. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore some insights into the relationship between thinking and action that have emerged from recent research on exceptional performance states (e.g., ‘flow’ and ‘choking’) in athletes. The paper begins by explaining why cognitive psychologists’ traditional indifference to sport has been replaced by a more enthusiastic attitude in recent years. The next section provides some insights into the relationship between thinking and skilled action that have emerged from research on ‘flow’ (or peak performance) and ‘choking’ (or impaired performance) experiences in athletes. The third section of the paper explores some practical issues that arise when athletes seek to exert conscious control over their thoughts in competitive situations. The final part of the paper considers the implications of research on thinking in action in sport for practical attempts to improve thinking skills in domains such as business organizations and schools. Author has checked copyright AMS Only 1 keyword.

It has long been known that athletes use mental imagery extensively for a variety of different purposes. Although many of these purposes have been well documented, several gaps remain in our understanding of atheletes’ imagery experiences. First, the issue of negative or debilitative imagery among athletes has received little research attention in sports psychology. In addition, until recently, athletes’ meta-imagery processes (i.e., their beliefs about the nature and regulation of their own imagery skills) have been neglected. So, the purpose of the present study is to use qualitative methodology to explore meta-imagery processes and imagery direction (i.e., facilitative or debilitative) in elite sports performers. The sample comprised seven participants from motor-sport, rugby, fencing and golf (mean age = 24.43 years; SD = 1.99). Results showed that motivational aspects of imagery were not as relevant to our sample of elite performers as they appear to have been in previous studies using non-elite samples. In addition, the elite performers in our study showed evidence of sophisticated meta-imagery control skills – being able, for example, to restructure negative imagery so that it facilitates future performance. Finally, our elite sample’s experience of imagery direction seems to be more complex than had previously been believed. For example, some athletes reported deliberately imagining errors in order to prepare for “worstcase” scenarios in competition (hence using such imagery to facilitate their performance). Overall, we propose that existing imagery use taxonomies that need to be revised to take into account the flexibility with which elite athletes actually employ imagery.

Imagery research has accumulated in two main waves since it was first investigated over a century ago. Firstly, in a period roughly extending over a century from the 1890s to the 1990s, several hundred experiments focused on the efficacy of the “mental practice” effect. More recently, attempts to shed light on the precise tasks or functions for which athletes use visualization in actual sport situations have led to an upsurge in imagery research. Central to this second wave of research is the imagery use framework (Hall et al., 1998), which has led to over 20 studies. Unfortunately, despite making significant advances these studies have a number of limitations, including a failure to include elite participants and the fact that they have largely overlooked meta-imagery abilities of the athletes. To address these issues, semi-structured interviews were used to explore imagery experiences among elite athletes. Canoe-slalom, which had been subject to previous research on imagery (e.g., White & Hardy, 1998), was the chosen sport. Five female and seven male elite level competitors (age= 25 years; SD = 4.16) participated. Findings from the elite athlete sample were inconsistent with previous research with regard to the motivational function of images. Furthermore, the athletes demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of imagery processes including imagery of realistic behaviours rather than perfect performance. Interestingly, the frequency of debilitative imagery was surprising given previous findings but may have been a consequence of the qualitative methods employed. Finally, examination of the meta-imagery construct proved valuable and is worthy of further research.

The term “attention” refers to people's ability to focus on information derived either from the external world or from internal sources such as their memory and imagination. In sport psychology, attentional processes such as “concentration,” or the ability to focus mental effort on the task at hand while ignoring distractions, are regarded as vital determinants of successful athletic performance. Given this importance of attention in sport, a variety of psychological exercises and techniques have been postulated to enhance athletes' concentration skills. Although none of these interventions has been validated adequately so far, some theoretical support exists for the use of the following strategies: simulation training, performance goal-setting, preperformance routines, trigger words and mental practice. Following an explanation of each of these concentration interventions, some unresolved issues are considered along with potentially fruitful new directions for research in this field.

The past decade has witnessed increased interest in the visual search behaviour of athletes. Little is known, however, about the relationship between anxiety and eye movements in sport performers or about the extent to which athletes' planned and actual visual search strategies correspond. To address these issues, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, eight expert female gymnasts were presented with three digital slides of a model performing a skill that is known to be anxiety-provoking in this sport--namely, the 'back flip' on the beam. By varying the height of the beam and the presence or absence of safety mats, the slides differed in the amount of anxiety that they elicited vicariously in the viewer. In the study, the gymnasts were asked to imagine themselves in the position of the depicted model and to describe the anxiety that they felt. As they viewed the slides, their eye movements were recorded. As predicted, anxiety was associated with an increase in the number of fixations to peripheral areas. In addition, the more 'threatening' slides elicited significantly more fixations than the less feared images. In Study 2, the plans of 15 equestrian performers (5 expert, 5 intermediate and 5 novice) were elicited as they engaged in a virtual 'walk' around a computerized show-jumping course. Contrary to expectations, the congruence between intended and actual search behaviour was not significantly greater for expert riders than for the less skilled groups. Also, the fact that the top riders allocated more fixations to slides than the less skilled performers challenged the prediction that expertise would be associated with economy of visual search. Finally, as expected, the expert riders were significantly less dependent on the overall 'course plan' than the intermediate and novice equestrian performers when inspecting the fences.

This study investigated the relationship between mindfulness training (a nonjudgmental attentional training technique) and flow experiences in athletes. Participants were 13 university athletes (M = 21 years), assigned either to a control group or an experimental group. Flow experiences were assessed before and after the intervention. ANOVA (group x time) of global scores on the Flow State Scale-2 (FSS-2; Jackson & Eklund, 2004) showed a significant interaction (F = 11.49, p < .05). Follow-up t tests indicated no significant difference (p > .05) between the experimental and control groups’ FSS-2 global scores at the baseline training session, but a large difference (p < .05, d = 1.66) at a follow-up training session. Significant interaction effects were also observed for FSS-2 subscales scores for the flow dimensions of “Clear Goals” (F =18.73, p < .05) and “Sense of Control” (F = 14.61, p < .05). Following an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of this study, the theoretical significance of the results is assessed and the promise for the application of mindfulness training in performance enhancement is discussed.

Kinaesthetic imagery involves feelings of force and motion or the mental simulation of sensations associated with bodily movements. Although this type of imagery is very important to athletes in many sports it has attracted little research attention from psychologists. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to investigate kinaesthetic imagery processes among a sample (n=12) of elite athletes - namely, World Cup competitors in canoe-slalom. These athletes (mean age = 25 years; SD=4.16) were first interviewed about their understanding and use of ‘feeling-oriented’ in their sport. Next, they were assessed using a battery of measures which included Likert rating scales and a standard test of mental imagery - the Movement Imagery Questionnaire-Revised (Hall & Martin, 1997). Finally, in an effort to validate their imagery experiences, athletes were timed as they engaged in a ‘mental travel’ procedure in which they had to visualise a recent race and execute it as if they were paddling physically. The time tak...