Skip to main content

Danilo Díaz Granados read: These Are The Pre-match Emotional Control Strategies That Higher-ranked Table Tennis Players Use More Than Lower-ranked Players

GettyImages-691190188.jpgBy Christian Jarrett

In explosive sports like sprinting, boxing and rugby you can use your pre-match nerves to fuel your determination, speed and aggression. In contrast, in a sport like table tennis that involves fine motor control, nerves can also stifle your performance, making you stiff and clumsy. It seems obvious that learning to control your emotions prior to games should therefore be important to table tennis players (and competitors in other sports that require precision). Yet, surprisingly, as the authors of a new paper in the Journal of Personality point out, “to date, only a few studies have investigated the relation between emotional regulation and … sport performance”.

To find out more, Jeanette Kubiak and her colleagues, at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, surveyed hundreds of league table tennis players in Germany about the ways they controlled their emotions prior to matches, and then compared these results against objective measures of the participants’ league performance. The research uncovered several emotional control strategies used more often by better and improving players. “Taken together, the findings provide evidence for the importance of emotion regulation regarding sport performance,” the researchers said.

Over 300 table tennis players took part covering a wide range of ability and with an average of 24 years experience playing the game (the average age was 39 and there were 70 women). Reflecting on the prior season, players rated how often they tended to use ten different emotional control strategies based on the “process model of emotion regulation” put forward by Stanford clinical psychologist James Gross.

The researchers looked at two end-of-season objective measures of success. The first was the players’ end-of-season ranking. They found that higher-ranked players more often calmed their pre-match nerves by: using physical preparation (e.g. swinging their arms and getting warmed up); using positive self-talk (e.g. telling themselves they will win); planning (e.g. thinking about their tactics); and by suppressing their negative emotions and deliberately giving off an impression of supreme confidence. On the other hand, higher-ranked players less often reported catastrophising, such as thinking how badly the game could go.

The second outcome measure was improved performance over the previous season – that is, winning more games this season than last. Improving players more often used positive self-talk and less often indulged in self-blame (e.g. thinking they should have practiced more); ruminated less about their anxious feelings; and catastrophised less.

The study is limited by its cross-sectional design. For instance, it’s possible that winning and earning a higher ranking changed how players managed their emotions, rather than emotional regulation driving better performance. The retrospective nature of the survey is another short-coming – it’s even possible that winning changes how players think about and remember their emotional strategies.

Nonetheless, as Kubiak and her team point out, “no [previous] studies have investigated several emotion regulation strategies affiliated with different stages in the process model of emotion regulation in handling emotions prior to a competition”.  They added that their findings “are interesting for sports psychology because they help to clarify why some competitive athletes fail to take full advantage of their performance potential, whereas others are successful.”

—Keep your cool and win the game: Emotion regulation and performance in table tennis

Image: Bastian Steger of Germany in action during Men Single second round at Table Tennis World Championship at Messe Duesseldorf on June 1, 2017 ( Maja Hitij / Getty Images Staff)

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest



View Source

Popular posts from this blog

Danilo Díaz Granados read: “Skunk” Cannabis Disrupts Brain Networks – But Effects Are Blocked In Other Strains

By Matthew Warren Over the past decade, neuroimaging studies have provided new insights into how psychoactive drugs alter the brain’s activity. Psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – has been found to reduce activity in brain regions involved in depression , for example, while MDMA seems to augment brain activity for positive memories . Now a new study sheds some light into what’s going in the brain when people smoke cannabis – and it turns out that the effects can be quite different depending on the specific strain of the drug. The research, published recently in the Journal of Psychopharmacology , suggests that cannabis disrupts particular brain networks  – but some strains can buffer against this disruption. Cannabis contains two major active ingredients: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). THC is responsible for many of the drug’s psychoactive effects, such as the feeling of being stoned and the anxiety that people sometimes feel, as well as ...
Read more

Danilo Díaz Granados read: Beyond the invisible gorilla – inattention can also render us numb and anosmic (without smell)

By Emma Young It’s well-known that we can miss apparently obvious objects in our visual field if other events are hogging our limited attention. The same has been shown for sounds: in a nod to Daniel Simons’ and Christopher Chabris’ famous gorilla/basketball study that demonstrated “inattentional blindness”, distracted participants in the first “inattentional deafness” study failed to hear a man walking through an auditory scene for 19 seconds saying repeatedly “I am a gorilla”. Now, two new studies separately show that a very similar effect occurs in relation to touch ( inattentional numbness ) and to smell   ( inattentional anosmia ).   Sandra Murphy and Polly Dalton (a co-author on the inattentional deafness paper) at Royal Holloway, University of London report in the journal Cognition on inattentional numbness. They wanted to go beyond the way we rapidly tune out ongoing tactile stimulation, like the sensation of our clothes, and explore what happens when we’re tou...
Read more

Danilo Díaz Granados read: A New Study Has Investigated Who Watched The ISIS Beheading Videos, Why, And What Effect It Had On Them

By Emma Young In the summer of 2014, two videos were released that shocked the world. They showed the beheadings, by ISIS, of two American journalists – first, James Foley and then Steven Sotloff. Though the videos were widely discussed on TV, print and online news, most outlets did not show the full footage. However, it was not difficult to find links to the videos online. At the time, Sarah Redmond at the University of California, Irvine and her colleagues were already a year into a longitudinal study to assess psychological responses to the Boston Marathon Bombing, which happened in April 2013. They realised that they could use the same nationally representative sample of US adults to investigate what kind of person chooses to watch an ISIS beheading – and why. Their findings now appear in a paper published in American Psychologist .   By late spring 2013, the researchers had recruited 4,675 adults online, and assessed their mental health, TV-watching habits, demographics,...
Read more