Front page | Health and fitness | Sports | Internet guide | E-mail the Herald
Psychologists Believe Sports Psychology Needs Therapy | |
By IRA DREYFUSS WASHINGTON - Don't expect to mind-game your way to a sports victory. Sports psychologists who claim you can may instead make a victory harder to get, according to a noted sports psychologist. Much of the accepted sports-psych wisdom is based on guesswork and some of the guesses are bad, said William P. Morgan of the University of Wisconsin. Some concepts are proven and do work, but sports psychology is too new and has too little solid research to give coaches and athletes consistent value, he said. Coaches and athletes are partly to blame for encouraging this, Morgan said. They want quick fixes, and they find psychologists who offer to deliver them, he said. As a result, sports psychologists who try to offer practical advice often base it on intuition, poorly designed sports studies or research performed for other purposes, he said. Sports psychologists may look at studies of people doing industrial jobs, and think athletes may do the same in competition, Morgan said. The problem is that clerical work or assembly line production doesn't require the same physical skills or have the same pressure, he said. Nor are clerks and factory workers commonly gifted with the skills of elite athletes, he said. And the mind-body relationship often doesn't work the way the experts expect, Morgan said. For instance, some psychologists think a player should use relaxation techniques to prevent anxiety from interfering with performance, Morgan said. But, while this seems to work with some athletes, others need to be keyed up because they perform poorly when they are highly relaxed, and yet others seem to perform best in the middle, he said. Paradoxically, some people who do mental relaxation exercises find their tension increases, he said. Mental practice - having the athlete vividly imagine performing the event - is another questionable area, Morgan said. The techniques might help beginners and nonelite athletes remember what they need to do, but there's no proof that they help athletes who already know their jobs well, he said. Even the value of encouraging self-confidence is open to doubt, Morgan said. When confident athletes do better, it may be that they are confident because they have the physical ability to do better, not that their confidence somehow makes them physically better, he said. Much of the research in sports psychology also is poor, Morgan said. For instance, there might not be a control group, he said. A control group is used for comparison to the group which gets the technique that the experimenter wants to test. Without this comparison group, it's hard to tell whether the technique created the change, or whether it would have happened anyway. If there is a control, researchers and subjects both often know who is getting the experimental technique, Morgan said. This may lead experimental subjects to perform better simply to please the researcher, regardless of whether the technique would have caused an improvement independently. However, some things do seem to work, Morgan said. Nonelite athletes in aerobic sports - runners, for instance - tend to perform better if they can take their minds off their own discomfort, he said. On the other hand, their ability to shift their mental focus may let them ignore pain that is a warning sign of injury, he said. And elite athletes seem to do better when they focus on what they are feeling, Morgan said. These star athletes know how to judge how hard to push themselves by paying attention to their bodies, he said. Although Morgan's ideas have value, today's athletes don't have the luxury of waiting for researchers such as Morgan to painstakingly prove what works, said another sports psychologist, Thomas Tutko of San Jose State University in California. "I would agree with Dr. Morgan that much of the research is tainted or flawed," Tutko said. Just the same, doctors don't wait until the medical research is perfect - if they see a treatment works, they use it, he said. And psychologists can do the same -working from the evidence of their own eyes about what works, he said. "Sports psychology is two fields - one is research, doing studies, and the other is down-in-the-trenches observation stuff," Tutko said. "On a practical standpoint, things start with observation." Copyright 1996 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | |