Valence, form, and content of self-talk predict sport type and level of performance

Nedergaard, Johanne; Christensen, Mark Schram; Wallentin, Mikkel

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2021.103102

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…The interaction we found between self-talk and pressure on both tasks met our expectation and echoed prior research showing that athletes under pressure tend to use self-talk to enhance their sports performance (Boudreault et al, 2018;Nedergaard et al, 2021). According to Beilock et al (2002;, being under pressure distracts the performer's attention from the required focus and impairs performance.…”

Section: Theoretical Explanations and Implicationssupporting

confidence: 86%

Interactive Effects on Motor Performance of Mindfulness, Performance Under Pressure, Self-Talk, and Motor Task Characteristics

Liu

Hsu

et al. 2022

Percept Mot Skills

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High mindfulness individuals have been found to perform better on motor tasks under various conditions, but it is unknown whether mindfulness and performance relate when performing under pressure or using different types of self-talk with different motor tasks. In this study, 46 male participants ( Mage = 21.4, SD = 1.72 years) with high mindfulness ( n = 23) and low mindfulness ( n = 23) performed dart-throwing and two-hand coordination tasks under pressure and non-pressure conditions and when using instructional and unrelated self-talk. First, on the two-hand coordination task, a three-way mixed ANOVA found: (a) a significant 3-way interaction in which a significantly poorer performance occurred under pressure (vs. without pressure), with low (vs. high) mindfulness and when using unrelated (vs. instructional) self-talk and (b) a significant interaction in which, both under pressure and not, both high and low mindfulness participants performed comparably when using instructional (vs. unrelated) self-talk. Second, on the dart-throwing task, mindfulness interacted with self-talk such that both high and low mindfulness participants performed better when using instructional self-talk, and pressure interacted with self-talk such that participants using instructional (vs. unrelated) self-talk performed better in both pressure and non-pressure conditions. We concluded that instructional self-talk was a useful cognitive strategy, perhaps particularly in pressure conditions and regardless of the degree of mindfulness, and its effectiveness extended to two different motor tasks. We discussed the theoretical implications of these findings, in terms of attention theory, self-talk, and motor control; and we highlighted our study’s limitations and practical applications and gave recommendations for future research.

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Section: Theoretical Explanations and Implicationssupporting

confidence: 86%

Interactive Effects on Motor Performance of Mindfulness, Performance Under Pressure, Self-Talk, and Motor Task Characteristics

Liu

Hsu

et al. 2022

Percept Mot Skills

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“…Self-talk was found to be used more in competition than during practice (Hardy, et al, 2005). It was also found that individual sport athletes, such as runners, use self-talk more frequently than their team sport counterparts (Hardy, et al, 2004;Hardy, et al, 2005;Nedergaard, et al, 2021). An early study among a small group of elite gymnasts found that self-verbalizations and certain forms of mental imagery seemed to differentiate the best gymnasts from those who failed to make the Olympic team.…”

Section: Self-talk Frequency In Sportsmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…When using self-talk to achieve goals, it is often reported that athletes use strategic self-talk for motivational and instructional purposes (Hardy, 2006;Hardy, et al, 2015) with motivational self-talk, according to the matching hypothesis, being more important for endurance sports while instructional self-talk is more important for more technical types of sports (Hatzigeorgiadis et al, 2004;Nedergaard et al, 2021;Theodorakis et al, 2000). A detailed linguistic description of the two types of self-talk is lacking, but examples of instructional self-talk include: elbow straight, stay low, move your feet while examples of motivational self-talk could be: You can do it!…”

Section: Motivational Vs Instructional Self-talkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reframing self-talk in endurance sports using grammatical taxonomy

Wallentin¹,

Nedergaard

2023

Preprint

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In this paper, we use a linguistic vocabulary to reframe self-talk in endurance sport through a focus on properties of the verbs (both main and auxiliary), nominals, including pronouns and demonstratives, positive or negative sentiment, negation, interrogatives, and exclamations. A focus on grammatical function allows us to analyze self-talk based tense (future, present and past) which prototypically relates to planning, description, and evaluation. Self-talk often serves as self-directed speech acts, where the self-talker is using language to accomplish some goal with respect to herself. A prototypical example is a verb in the imperative mood. The use of auxiliary modal verbs (e.g. must, should, can, will, might) is frequent across three main types of utterances: Deontic modality involving permission and obligation; dynamic modality involving ability and willingness; epistemic modality involving probabilistic judgements. These all function to establish a hypothetical domain for further reflection, which is key in self-talk. Nouns yield a bounded space to and when this is related to the self, we may use 1st and 2nd person pronouns (I/you) and determine the mental distance to the topic using spatial demonstratives (this/that). Positive or negative sentiment can be added using adjectives or adverbs, while negation yields a means for impulse control. We can question our own utterances, and when unexpected things happen, we can use exclamations to communicate surprise. These are all vital mental tools in endurance sports and incorporating them in self-talk research will likely yield more specific self-talk interventions and lead to better performance for athletes.

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“…There is convincing evidence that marathon runners, for example, believe that self-talk helps them perform better (McCormick et al, 2018;Nedergaard et al, 2021;Schüler & Langens, 2007;Van Raalte et al, 2015) but evidence from interventions concerning whether it actually helps is mixed. As athletes generally differ in what kinds of self-talk helps them based on the type of sport (Theodorakis et al, 2000), their level of expertise (Nedergaard et al, 2021), and whether the setting is competition or training (Hatzigeorgiadis et al, 2014), we would expect interference to be differentially disruptive as well. For example, novices appear to benefit more from self-talk which yields the prediction that they would be more adversely affected by verbal interference (Nedergaard et al 2021).…”

Section: Sport Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As athletes generally differ in what kinds of self-talk helps them based on the type of sport (Theodorakis et al, 2000), their level of expertise (Nedergaard et al, 2021), and whether the setting is competition or training (Hatzigeorgiadis et al, 2014), we would expect interference to be differentially disruptive as well. For example, novices appear to benefit more from self-talk which yields the prediction that they would be more adversely affected by verbal interference (Nedergaard et al 2021).…”

Section: Sport Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mind over body: Interfering with the inner voice is detrimental to endurance performance

Nedergaard

Christensen²,

Wallentin³

2022

Preprint

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In two preregistered experiments, we investigated whether people were less able to push themselves physically when distracted from using their internal language. In both experiments, participants performed 12 cycling trials (Experiment 1: N = 49; Experiment 2: N = 50), each lasting one minute where participants were required to cycle as fast as possible while engaging in either a visuospatial task, a verbal task or with no interference. Participants performed worse in the verbal interference condition compared with the control condition (Experiment 1: d’ = 0.29; Experiment 2: d’ = 1). Verbal interference was also significantly worse than visuospatial interference in Experiment 2 (d = 0.43) but only numerically worse in Experiment 1 (d’ = 0.29). These differences were likely due to a more demanding interference task format in Experiment 2. These experiments indicate that the inner voice plays an important role in top-down control of sustained physical efforts.

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Valence, form, and content of self-talk predict sport type and level of performance

Cited by 12 publications

References 72 publications

Interactive Effects on Motor Performance of Mindfulness, Performance Under Pressure, Self-Talk, and Motor Task Characteristics

Interactive Effects on Motor Performance of Mindfulness, Performance Under Pressure, Self-Talk, and Motor Task Characteristics

Reframing self-talk in endurance sports using grammatical taxonomy

Mind over body: Interfering with the inner voice is detrimental to endurance performance

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