Sports Psychology Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The idea comes from Adler.

Alfred Adler, founder of individual psychology, held that social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefuehl), a person's feeling of belonging and concern for others, is the barometer or measure of psychological health. Well-adjusted people direct their striving towards the welfare of the community, while neurotic people pursue purely personal superiority.

Allport is known for trait theory and the concept of the mature personality, Freud for psychoanalysis and the id, ego and superego, and Eysenck for the dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism. None of them made social attitude the test of mental health.

Answer: C

Sociological thinking influences both (A) and (B): the objectives and the ends of education.

Educational sociology treats education as a social process. It shapes what education aims at, such as citizenship, social efficiency and adjustment to the group, and therefore its objectives, the specific goals of teaching. Physical education adopts objectives such as cooperation, leadership and sportsmanship for the same reason.

Because both the objectives and the ends are influenced, either one alone is incomplete, and 'None of the above' is wrong.

Answer: C

Much of motor skill learning takes place during childhood.

Childhood, roughly from age 2 to the start of puberty, is when fundamental movement skills such as running, jumping, throwing, catching and balancing are learnt and refined, and the later childhood years are often called the 'skill-hungry' or golden age of motor learning. Specialised sports skills are built on this foundation.

Infancy is dominated by reflexes and rudimentary movements such as sitting, crawling and first steps. During puberty and adolescence, rapid growth can temporarily disturb coordination, so these are periods of refining rather than acquiring most skills.

Answer: D

The personal factors are all of the above.

Factors in learning are commonly divided into personal factors, belonging to the learner, and environmental factors, belonging to the surroundings. Personal factors include heredity (innate capacities and body build), fitness or physical condition (health, fatigue, sense organs) and psychological factors (motivation, intelligence, interest, attention and emotional state).

Since heredity, fitness and psychological factors are all personal, any single option leaves out the others.

Answer: B

The secondary law of learning is the Law of recency.

Thorndike's three primary laws of learning are the law of readiness, the law of exercise and the law of effect. Physical education texts list further secondary (subsidiary) laws, among them the laws of primacy, recency and intensity. The law of recency says that what has been practised most recently is remembered best.

Readiness, exercise and effect are the primary laws, so they cannot be the secondary law asked for.

Answer: C

The code is a-4, b-1, c-2, d-3.

• Insight theory (Kohler's Gestalt account of sudden understanding) is a theory of learning.
• Attribution theory (Weiner) explains how the causes people give for success and failure affect their motivation.
• Drive theory in its frustration-aggression form explains aggression as a drive aroused by frustration.
• Psychodynamic theory (Freud) is a theory of personality.

Options A, B and D give insight theory to motivation, aggression or personality, so only C matches.

Answer: D

Both (A) and (R) are true.

Socialization is the process by which a person learns the values, norms and roles of society. Games and sports are an important agency of it: through them children learn to cooperate, follow rules, accept decisions, respect opponents and work in a team, which is the statement in (A).

(R) gives the same idea from the other side: by demanding cooperation, discipline and fair play, games and sports inculcate social habits. Since both statements hold, the options calling one or both false (A, B and C) are wrong. The paper's code list has no option on whether (R) explains (A).

Answer: A

The code is a-2, b-3, c-4, d-1.

Three of the pairs are standard in histories of play theory:

• The catharsis theory, that play purges pent-up emotion, goes back to Aristotle's idea of catharsis.
• The self-expression theory is that of Mitchell and Bernard S. Mason, who saw play as the expression of the self.
• The instinct (pre-exercise) theory is Karl Groos's, that play is instinctive practice for adult life.

Only option A gives Aristotle to catharsis and Groos to instinct, which leaves Plato with the social contact theory. Options B, C and D give catharsis to Plato or Groos, which is wrong.

Answer: D

The key's answer is (I) cognitive theory and (III) self-perception theory.

Cognitive approaches, such as cognitive dissonance, explain attitude change as the person's effort to remove an inconsistency between beliefs, feelings and behaviour: when one part of an attitude is changed, the others move to match. Bem's self-perception theory says people infer their attitudes from watching their own behaviour, so a changed way of acting can change the attitude.

Social learning theory is more often cited for how attitudes are acquired by imitating role models, and operant conditioning for shaping behaviour by reward and punishment, so the key does not pair them. Sources on attitude change in sport do not separate the theories sharply, and I could not find the paper's own source, so this rests on the key.

Answer: D

The anxiety reduction techniques are (I) progressive relaxation and (III) autogenic training.

Jacobson's progressive muscle relaxation has the athlete tense and then release each muscle group in turn, learning to recognise and remove tension. Schultz's autogenic training uses self-suggestions of warmth and heaviness in the limbs to produce a relaxed state. Both act directly on anxiety, through the body.

Positive reinforcement is a technique for shaping and motivating behaviour, and goal setting is a technique for directing effort and building motivation. Both are valuable in sport psychology, but neither is primarily a method of reducing anxiety, so codes that include (II) or (IV) are wrong.