Rom 14: 19 So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another. ‘The results suggest,’ conclude the researchers, ‘that frequent verbal encouragement (every 20s and 60s in the present study) leads to significantly greater maximum effort in a treadmill test than when no encouragement is given or when the encouragement is infrequent…’ ‘Our results clearly show that verbal encouragement intended to increase a person’s maximal effort has profound effects on performance.’ But what were the psychological mechanisms behind this increased maximal effort. The researchers, who can only speculate, offer several possible explanations: 1. Talking to the participants might have distracted them from the discomfort of the test and made it less ‘aversive’ (the so-called dissociative strategy); 2. Some of the encouragement statements (e.g. ‘Excellent!’ and ‘Good job!’ can be seen as ‘positive reinforcers’, helping to maintain the running response; 3. Others (e.g. ‘Come on!’, ‘Keep it up!’ and ‘Let’s go!’ resembled instructional commands, which might lead to greater response effort since most people have a history of following instructions; 4. Some of the statements might have acted as ‘establishing operations’, increasing the value of the stimuli that reinforce running on the treadmill (i.e. achieving a competitive goal, looking good, avoiding failure). pponline.co.uk/encyc/sport-psychology-encouragement-boosts-performance-113
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 19:19:42 +0000