Applied Psychology and Performance Optimization

Applied Psychology: Performance Psychology

Applied Psychology

  • Applied psychology refers to the application of psychological principles in non-clinical settings.
  • It encompasses areas like health psychology, sport and exercise psychology, and organizational psychology.
  • The focus of these lectures will be on performance psychology, which is relevant across various fields.

Performance Psychology

  • Definition: The study and application of psychological principles to help people consistently perform at their best and enjoy the process.
  • Key domains:
    • Sports
    • Music/Performing Arts
    • Education
    • Business
    • Gaming (e-sports)

Optimal Psychological States

Flow States

  • Introduced by Sixentmi Highley in 1975.

  • Subjective state associated with:

    • Increased productivity
    • Creativity
    • Focus
    • Overall performance
    • Enjoyment

  • Definition: A state where people are completely involved in an activity, losing track of time and fatigue.

  • Widely sought after by organizations like Formula One, Microsoft, and the US Navy SEALs.

  • 9-Dimension Framework of Flow:

    • Conditions:
      • Clear goals
      • Challenge-skill balance: appropriate balance between task difficulty and one's abilities
      • Unambiguous feedback: knowing how you're progressing.
    • Characteristics:
      • Action and awareness merging: deep involvement in the task.
      • Sense of control
      • Autotelic experience: doing the task for its own sake.
      • Concentration on the task at hand: being highly focused.
      • Loss of self-consciousness: not worrying about what others think.
      • Transformation of time: time perceived to speed up or slow down.

  • Strong correlations between intrinsic motivation and flow.

  • Challenge-skill balance is considered a crucial precursor to flow.

  • If skills are too high and the challenge is too low → boredom.

  • If challenge is too high and skills are too low → anxiety.

Criticisms of Flow Theory

  • Lack of Falsifiability: Semihaley himself admitted the framework is difficult to test.

  • Research focuses on constructs associated with flow rather than causal mechanisms.

  • It's unclear how to reliably induce flow.

  • Imprecise Definitions: What constitutes a clear goal or unambiguous feedback?

  • Overlapping Constructs: Loss of self-consciousness, action-awareness merging, and concentration may capture similar ideas.

  • Core constructs like intrinsic motivation aren't part of the framework.

  • Low support for certain dimensions (e.g., time transformation).

  • How many dimensions are needed for a flow experience?

  • The difficulty of studying flow:

    • Infeasible to attach brain scanners to athletes/artists during performance.
    • Difficult to induce flow in a lab setting due to the artificial context.
Integrated Model of Flow and Clutch States
  • Suggests two distinct yet overlapping optimal states.
  • Emerged from event-focused interviews with athletes within 7 days of an event.
  • Highlights a chronological process in the occurrence of these states.
  • Flow States:
    • Context: Novel, exploratory, open environment.
    • Process: Positive event → increased confidence → challenge appraisal (exploratory) → open ended goals
    • Effortless, automatic, positive feedback.
    • Enjoyment, motivation, perceived control.
    • Intrinsic rewards and energizing effect.
  • Clutch States:
    • Context: Pressure moments, outcome on the line, deadlines.
    • Challenge appraisal focused on achieving a fixed goal (e.g., submitting an assessment in 2 hours).
    • Decision to increase effort and intensity.
    • Effortful, conscious, deliberate.
    • Exhausting.
  • Multiple psychological states underlie optimal experiences.
  • The integrated model suggests multiple psychological states underlie optimal performance.
How flow states occur
  • Positive feedback (internal or external) → increased confidence → challenge appraisal (novelty & exploration).
  • Challenge appraisals are facilitated by high self-efficacy and approach goal orientation.
  • Setting open goals (devoid of specific outcomes).
  • Attentional focus away from inhibitors of flow (e.g. listening to music).
  • Letting it happen.
How clutch states occur
  • Situational, specific, fixed goals that are relevant to the situation (outcome and performance-focused).
  • Goals might involve realizing a specific need with little time left.
  • Increased effort and intensity.
  • More focus on active self-regulation strategies: motivational/instructional self-talk, micro-goals, self-monitoring.
  • Making it happen: much more deliberate.
Cognitive Performance Study
  • Conducted a study with letter-number identification task to investigate the effects of open goals and specific goal.
  • Participants randomly assigned to Open goal conditon, specific goal condition and control.
  • Participants in the specific goals group experienced more clutch states, whereas the increase in objective performance was observed in the specific goals group.
  • People who got an open goal, um, believe they did better despite doing worse.
  • The question becomes what's more important? Is it around their subjective performance or their objective performance?
  • Changing the nature of a goal impacts actual performance and how they perceive performance.

Pressure and Choking

  • Pressure: Any factor that increases the importance of performing well.
  • Choking Under Pressure: A considerable decrease in skill execution when standards are normally achievable, stemming from increased anxiety.
  • Key characteristics:
    • Drastic performance decrease
    • Negative interpretations of anxiety
    • Lack of perceived control
    • Self-presentation concerns
Theories of Choking Under Pressure
  • All theories related to attention and task relevant attention.
  • Distraction Theory:
    • Attention is distracted by external sources or internal thoughts.
    • Leads to motor breakdown through reduced processing efficiency.
    • Compensation: increase mental effort.
  • Self-Focused Theories:
    • Paralysis by analysis.
    • Attention is pushed towards the task in an unhelpful way.
    • Overthinking procedural step by step executions.
Attentional Control Theory
  • Increased anxiety diverts attention to task-irrelevant distractions, reducing efficiency.
  • Distraction-based Interventions: Prevent distractions and promote a task-relevant focus.
Reinvestment Theory
  • Anxiety causes performers to consciously attend to movement execution.
  • Leads to step by step execution of well-learned behavior.
  • Minimize explicit knowledge reinvestment and conscious control of attention.

Strategies for Supporting Performance and Maintaining Attention

  • Interpret or sit with the experience of anxiety
  • Maintain focus and attention

Applied Psychology - Supporting Performance

Therapeutic Perspectives on Performance and Pressure

  • Understanding different perspectives on the relationship between anxiety, pressure, and performance.

  • Waves of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:

    • First Wave:
      • Behaviorism: Environment determines behavior.
    • Second Wave:
      • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Control or change unpleasant internal experiences.
    • Third Wave:

  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Accept emotions and act committed.

Cognitive Restructuring Approach

*Corrects ineffective patterns of thought based on the belief that behavioral and emotional change can be accessed by cognitive reconstruction.

Acceptance and Commitment Approach

*This approach focus on accepting unpleasant emotions.
*Focus on actions that aligns with self value.

Acceptance and Commitment-Based Approaches
  • Focus on accepting unpleasant experiences while remaining engaged in the task at hand.
  • Commit to values-guided behavior.
  • Strategies:
    • Notice, accept, and create space from our thoughts (cognitive diffusion).
    • Remain present and focus on the task at hand (mindfulness).
    • Commit to the pursuit of values-guided behavior.
Values

*Self statements that we consider important in our lives

Mindfulness

*It is a type of meditation in which you focus on being aware of what you’re sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment..
*If thoughts do emerge, that's ok.

Psychological Skills Training
  • Focus is more on changing, challenging and controlling our internal experiences but can also be used with the third wave approach.
  • Steps:
    • Confidence:
      • Build through self-efficacy theory.
      • Develop an awareness.
      • Log in evidence.
      • Manipulate your environment.
      • Use psychological skills.
      • Focus on strengths.
    • Goal Setting:
      • Help with the way we study for the exam.
      • Most likely to stem from open goals, those much more effortless automatic experiences, whereas more clutch-like experiences.
      • More likely to occur when pursuing specific goals.
      • Process, performance and outcome goals.
      • Process goals center on the execution of behaviors/skills/strategies and elicit a strong performance in response.
      • Achievement goal theory in week 3, when we talked about motivation, the idea of approach and avoidance oriented goals.
    • Self-Talk:
      • Cues or statements that we used based on pre determined plan.
      • Types:
        *Instructional and Motivational Talk
      • It's not something we're going to give someone a statement to say, it's going to be something that's, um, personal to you that kind of either motivates in the sense of motivational, or it's something that you can focus on.
        *Benefits depends on the task
    • Relaxation Techniques:
      • Use of imagery, physical and mental techniques in order to calm you.
Pressure Training

*When practicing, we need to focus on having a supportive environment in order to be successful in our performance

  • The manipulation of the practice environment with the intent to create a stress-related response within the performer.
  • Increases pressure by presence of people, high difficulty of task due to no second chance.
  • Simulate a test environment by working with time constraints and in a similar physical location.