The Term, Social Facilitation, By Floyd Allport

Researchers and team sports professionals all over the world are using performance analysis both to improve their understanding of their sport and the development of their teams (Taylor et al., 2008).

Attention is thought to be selective-focused on one subject at a time. Traditionally, it has been assumed that automatic processing is involuntary, it does not require attention, and is relatively fast; whereas, controlled processing is voluntary, does require attention, and is relatively slow. We can conclude from this that the more we repeat a certain material or tasks the more it becomes automatic and effortless to us.

Judy Willis, an Edutopia blogger , “asserts that appropriately challenging tasks are necessary for cognitive growth; if a task is too easy, ‘ . . . the brain is not alert for feedback and there is no activation of the dopamine reward response system’” (cited in Doubet, 2013, p. 10). The goal when challenging

There are many terms that we use in our everyday lives that also have their own application to the field of Sport and Performance psychology. For example, performance is simply performing a sport, whether it is team or individual. Commonly, athletes are striving to increase performance. Researchers record how the athlete performed at during a set task, then compare it to an equal measure and performance at a different time. An example would be, how many free throws were made out of shooting 10 shots, or how many passes were recorded in a game.

There is also another interesting finding concerning students’ performance in Task 2B (bead pattern A-B-C) and Task 2D (bead pattern A-A-B-B-B). According to our design estimation, the pattern A-B-C was considered of lower difficulty level. Surprisingly, Task 2D appeared to be easier for the participants than Task 2B.

“A systematically designed activity that has been created specifically to improve an individual’s performance in a given domain (Ericsson, K. A., R. Th. Krampe, R.Th. and Tesch-Römer, C, 1993).”

Participants were led to an isolated lab room were they participated in a task-switching experiment. They were involved in 2 tasks a magnitude test and an odd even task. There was 100 randomly assigned trials 50% task-switch and 50% task-repeat that were completed by the participants. There were different type keys presented to the participants such as: z for an odd number, x for an even number, m for a number (>) than 5,

The subjects were given mimeographed answer forms that were assumed to match the ones in front of the test takers. The subjects answer forms contained the correct answers so that they could keep track of the test takers scores. There were two tasks consisting of twenty-five questions each. The first consisted of household objects and was female oriented. The second consisted of mechanical objects and was male oriented. There was only one task completed during each experimental session chosen by the experimenter. The instructions given to each subject emphasized that a person’s performance is influenced by factors such as luck, ability, and effort. These factors were told to be kept in mind as well as the tone and hesitation in the test takers voice.

Participants will be assigned into four lab rooms with twenty students in each. First they will be primed randomly with either promotion or prevention focus, by writing a short essay describing how their personal standards had changed as they get matured, and they also need to complete the Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (Higgins et al., 2001) to check the success of the manipulation. Second, they will be given a difficult college-level math problem to solve and hand in within 20 minutes. Third, their answer sheets, which all have a failed feedback regardless of their actual performance, will be returned to them. Forth, they will be given a survey on rating of how enjoyable the math problem was, as well as indicate their choice for the next task to perform: a similar math problem or a different word or logic puzzle task which share the same difficulty. Finally, once the surveys are collected, the experiment is done. Participants are free to quit the task at anytime. If so, the quitted students will also be excluded from the analysis.

Thomas Sander and Robert Putman wrote this article to summarize trend of social involvement in the community, and the events that caused this over the past century. It starts out informing us the benefits of a more social society, that people will be happier, less crime, economic benefits, etc. the article talks about the negative trend, but then goes into talking about how the post 9/11 youth changed this social trend, and high school and college, even middle school or grade school, started to be more active in their community’s. They conclude that one reason for this could that they realized the importance of knowing the people around them and having relationships in the community if crises did hit. It also caused the youth to believe that

Back to the starting point of assessing the big picture, the broad horizon....once enough data is retrieved from the rapidly changing environment, the brain internalizes the data, discards the invalid data (noted as a distraction), then narrowly focuses on the data to rehearse it, then it can move on to the performance. If the brain rushes through any of this split second processing, it can make a mistake/error.

In earlier days sports psychology was mostly concerned with developing assessment methods that would identify those people with the potential to become serious superior athletes. Today the focus is on psychological training, exercises that strengthen the mental skills that will help athletic performances on the path to excellence. These skills include mental imagery and focus training. If an athlete is serious about becoming the best he or she can possibly be, the most essential ingredient is commitment to practice the right things. It takes incredible commitment to reach the top: a commitment to rest and train the body so it can perform under the most demanding conditions and a commitment to train the mind to

One thing every Olympian has is a burning passion inside him or her to succeed and be the best. An internal fire ignited within them. It is impossible to be at the level these athletes are without giving it everything they have. One of the greatest competitors of all time, Michael Jordan, said this, “I play to win, whether during practice or a real game. And I will not let anything get in the way of me and my competitive enthusiasm to win.” With that in mind, it is logical to conclude that Olympic athletes generally have a greater amount of intrinsic motivation. Yet, sometimes even the best athletes in the world get burnt out and struggle to give the maximum effort needed to succeed. A study (Pensgaard, 1998) done at the 1996 Olympic games

Participants could not correct mistakes in button presses. The experiment included two types of trials: some trials had an irrelevant speech background (a passage from Franz Kafka in German) and some had a quiet background. The order of background conditions Participants completed two blocks. Each block contained 30 trials.

Agents of socialization in short are the people, groups, and social institutions, as well as the interactions within these groups that influence a person’s social and self-development. Agents of socialization are believed to provide the critical information needed for children to function successfully as a member of society. Some examples of such agents are family, neighborhood, schools, peers, religion, sports, the workplace, and especially the mass media. Each agent of socialization is linked to another. For example, in the media, symbolic images affect both the individual and the society, making the mass media the most controversial socialization agent. One of the most obvious places agents of socialization lay is in the malls of