Self-talk in the context of sport and exercise

International Conference on Sports Medicine and Fitness

March 23-25, 2015 Chicago, USA

Alexander T Latinjak

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Sports Med Doping Stud

Abstract :

For over three decades, distinguished researchers in the area of sport science have been interested in the study of the self-talk phenomenon in sports and exercise. Throughout the past decade, studies about self-talk have multiplied and a categorization has been established which divided those studies in two research paradigms: Strategic self-talk interventions and automatic self-talk. I and my team have managed to make a contribution to both. Firstly, we advanced our knowledge regarding strategic self-talk interventions. We illustrated that changes in attention, concentration and thought-content, produced by self-talk, are partly responsible for the interventionsâ?? effects on performance. Moreover, we invented, implemented and promoted a new type of self-talk called self-feedback. This type of self-talk consisted of teaching the athlete to give him/herself executionrelated feedback after task execution. In regard to automatic self-talk, we were the first to introduce the distinction between goal-directed and spontaneous self-talk in sport psychology. Thereby, we challenged the contemporary definitions and categorizations of self-talk, to the point that we are currently developing a new framework for the study of self-talk in sport and exercise science. In this new approach to the understanding of the self-talk phenomenon, we place a particular emphasis on the common and differential features of self-talk in comparison to other psychological constructs such as thoughts or emotions.