The purpose of this work is to provide a possible method for overcoming psychological difficulties such as fear, apprehension, sense of failure, and others found in students gymnasts. The method that we have proposed is psychological skills training (...
The purpose of this work is to provide a possible method for overcoming psychological difficulties such as fear, apprehension, sense of failure, and others found in students gymnasts. The method that we have proposed is psychological skills training (henceforth, PST) conducted on 10 university gymnasts with a total of 22 measurements over a period of 12 weeks. The gymnasts are 20 years of age with a sd=.816 and have average performance career length of 10.2 years with sd=1.45. PST was given to the athletes twice a week for the periods of 30-90 minutes for each session. These sessions were composed of three experimental stages as preparatory, education, and training stage by way of questionnaire.
PST has been applied to five response factors such as goal orientation, psychological skill, attentive evaluation, cognitive evaluation, and attitudes toward PST in an affect to lessen difficulties in successful performance.
From these experiments, some fruitful conclusions have been drawn, they are as follows.
Firstly, goal orientation marks high points in individual motivation and low points in task motivation for both male and female gymnasts. For example, in female gymnasts, high points were reached in the goal orientation on the 1st measurement on the baseline and the 4th measurement in the education stage. By contrast, the points of male gymnasts dropped significantly lower in the last measurement of the 3rd measurement on the baseline and increased significantly higher in the 4th and the 5th measurement for both individual and task motivation. Secondly, roughly speaking, it can be said that the males receive higher points than the female in regards to the psychological skills. The former group received more points in team unity and imagery ability than any other factors in these experiments. The anxiety controllability represents the lowest level of scales, while concentration is second to this. The latter group shows relatively stronger achievement in team unity than the male group. We can not find big differences between the sense of confidence and concentration. In male students, the imagery ability was enhanced more than team unity, that is, the imagery ability received the highest scores of all other factors on the 4th measurement.
Thirdly, as for attentive style, profile form was not observed in the 1st and the 2nd measurements in the male group, but it started on the baseline from the 3rd measurement. Broadly speaking, a slightly desirable form was seen in the attentive style, except the relative lowness in the internal attentive style of the 3th and the 4th measurement. In the 5th measurement, an opposite profile form appeared to be seen in the desirable profile form. On the contrary, the male gymnasts represent the highest scores in the external overload of the 1st measurement, but they gained a more desirable attention style from the 2nd measurement. And in the 4th measurement, almost perfect profile points were observed in the attentive style and in the 5th measurement, the high scores were found in the negative attention style of the internal overload and the restrictive non-effect.
And lastly, what is important is that this experiment demonstrates that the female performers placed primary importance on their future career, injuries during their performances, satisfactory performance results, and academic achievements on the baseline measurement. In the post experiment, they felt that their performance results, injuries, and future career were the most significant. They also felt that coaches and their economic situation were not important factors. The male performers, however, seemed to understand that their future career, injuries during their performances, economic situation, and result of performances were of the most importance. It would be safe to say that the treatment of family affairs and friends was considered to be of the least importance.
For the state of their attitudes toward PST, it was found that the male performers had more positive attitude than the female performers. By contrast, the female gymnasts evaluated the researchers who were employed for this psychological experiments much more positively than their male counterparts.