Motivation and Broadbent’s Filter Model of Attention

Foundations in Sport Psychology

• XingChi Shen

Term Paper for the Course Foundations in Sport Psychology

Abstract: in this paper, two most impressive topics, the motivation and Broadbent’s filter model of attention respectively, are chosen from various interesting topics as the focus of this essay. First their concepts are analyzed and then their applications in the cheerleading phenomenon are discussed. Cheerleaders can raise spirits, strengthen confidence, and set up the players a motivation and strengthen psychological pressure on the rivals and achieve deterrent effects on the rivals. But on the other hand, cheerleaders can generate some negativeeffects. Therefore, in practice people should appropriately design and organize the activities of the cheerleaders to let the cheerleaders’ affect the audiences, and strengthen the athletes’ confidence, and enhance the audience’s passions. At last, my personal reflection for this course is addressed.

1. Topics Chosen

During the process of studying the course of Foundations in Sport Psychology, we learned many principles of sport psychology, including the concepts of collaboration and competition, the process of the cognitive psychology, the concepts of social loafing, and the motivation of sport (Martin, Carlson, and Buskist, 2000; Weinberg & Gould 2011). We also knew the experimental method and biological fundaments of psychology. Although the course emphasizes psychological factors in sport, but the course provides us many general theories of psychology. This course has opened our minds and shown us a colorful world in our inside world, which we never noted before. However, among various interesting topics, two are most impressive for us: the motivation and Broadbent’s filter model for people’s cognitive process. In this paper we will choose these two topics as the focus of this essay and discuss their applications in the sport.

2. Theoretical and Conceptual Principles of Sport Psychology

In the first place, motivation is one of the most important concepts in sport psychology because people participating any sport have various motivations. For example, some people play tennis with friends because they mainly want to improve skills and have fun with friends, while other may want to develop fitness by playing tennis. For some professional athletes, their motivation is to achieve a success in their sport career. From this class we learn the interactional view of motivation: motivated behavior is primarily determined by situational factors, but motivated behavior results from the interaction of participant personal factors and situational factors (Martin, Carlson, and Buskist, 2000; Weinberg & Gould 2011). Shown in Fig.1, personal factors contain athletes’ personalities, needs, interests, and goals, while situational factors includes lead-coach style, team win loss record, and facilities attractiveness, etc (Martin, Carlson, and Buskist, 2000; Weinberg & Gould 2011). Here situational factors also include audience response in the competition. Athletes apparently can be affected by audience response, while cheerleading is a very important method to stimulate the audiences’ response in matches.

Fig.1 interaction of participant personal factors and situational factors

In the second place, psychological research shows when people engage in certain activities, their psychological status will be affected by the environment. Consequently, their actions and actions results will be further affected by these factors accordingly. In the field of sports, a lot of practices have shown that athlete’s cheerleaders will impose certain psychological effects, thereby affecting the athlete’s sport results or performance. Even the American diver Michelle Davison says, “Everyone is pretty much at the same level physically,” [The difference comes down to] who can hold it together mentally.” (Using Psychology to Improve Sports Performance 2014). Moreover, Dr. Magulubur published a paper in Olympic scientific congress in 1984 that the impact of psychological factors for the athletes in low, mid-level skills is 20%, bio-mechanical factors account for 80%. For elite athletes these numbers are just the opposite. i.e., psychological factors may account for 80% and biological mechanical actors are 20% (Using Psychology to Improve Sports Performance 2014). American track and file athlete Carl Lewis has said 90% of preparation is the pre-match psychological. So the psychological factors play a decisive role in the match.

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Moreover, many researchers have investigated the influence of the mental factors for the performance of the athletes and injure of athletes in details. For example, they investigated the psychological factors such as the competitive anxiety and coach may lead to injure of the athletes in matches (Junge 2000).

Among many explanations about the connection between psychological status and the performance of athletes, we just concern the psychological theory of attention, since in the competition of athletes. The problem of attention is very important for an athlete to achieve success. In basis of Broadbent filter’s model shown as Fig.2, people have a process to use a message they receive (Broadbent, 1958). First, all messages from outside are input into the sensor store of human, but selectively transferred into our brains, in basis of their physical properties such as color, pitch, and loudness. After going through a bottleneck, the information is transmitted into high level processing and finally into short term memory and then into long term memory. This theory emphasizes that the world comprises of many more sensations than we can handle by the perceptual and cognitive capabilities of humans. To cope with the information, we have to selectively keep to some information. Attention, therefore, is the result of a limited-capacity information-processing system.

Fig.2 Broadbent’s filter model of attention

We noted that the cheerleading becomes a very common activities in the match, especially in the NFL (National Football League) and NBA (National Basketball Association) basket ball companions. And even the cheerleading becomes one necessary part of match in the US. We see often them from the TV and newspaper. Therefore, we are interested in what the functions of the cheerleading in the match, and how the applications of the aforementioned principles of sport psychology into the “cheerleaders phenomenon”. We will explain these details in the next section.

3.Application to Cheerleaders Phenomenon

3.1 The introduction of cheerleader

Even though currently most cheerleads team consists of females, the cheerleading began as all-male activity. The first cheerleader team dates back to in 1987, when cheerleaders yelled at the stadium of the Princeton University for their baseball and football athletes. After that, many universities and high schools have established such of cheerleaders and they often play performances in the NFL and NBA matches.

Table 1. Top 10 cheerleading organizations in the US (Campo-Flores 2007 )

However, until 1980 in the United States, cheerleading has developed into the athletics competition, gradually developed into International All Star Cheerleading Association (the IASCA) competition (Smith 2007). In 1998, International Cheerleading Union (International Cheerleading Federation), a world cheerleading organization supported by the United States – was established as an important turning point in the history of cheerleading. The International Cheerleading Union successfully hosted the first Cheerleading World Championship in 2001. Eight countries (Finland, Germany, Japan, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and China Taiwan) around the world participated, and the Japanese team won the championship (Campo-Flores 2007). Newsday, cheerleading itself has developed into an independent sport. Today it is estimated that over 1.5 million participants are active in the all star cheerleading in the US. In addition, about 1000,000 cheerleaders are scattered around the world, including Canada, China, German, Japan, and United Kingdom. To date, more than 60 countries around the world to carry out this campaign (Campo-Flores 2007).

Fig.3 the Cheerleader of NFL and NBA – Boston Celtics

(Cheerleaders of NFL and NBA – Boston Celtics 2014)

Today modern cheerleaders movement blends many elements of hand gymnastics, dancing, gymnastics, sports skills, coupled with a strong sense of rhythm music. They demonstrate the athletes’ spirit and collective spirit of solidarity in the competition.

In addition to athletes, referees, and spectators, cheerleaders are active in sports venues of the “fourth character.” At least cheerleading has a function of spectators. But unlike simple spectators, cheerleading has more obvious and deliberate purpose on the athletes. With respect to the athletes themselves, cheerleading is an external factor capable of acting on the inner psychological athletes. In this section we will apply the theory of the motivation and the cognitive psychology in analyzing the cheerleading phenomenon.

3.2 Format of cheerleader

According to its organization format, cheerleading can mainly be divided into the following two categories:

(1) Simple cheerleaders:

They are also known as “yelling cheerleaders”. They mainly consist of the athletes’ families, friends and fans. They just yell, clap, or shake hands at the stadium in order to “encourage” athletes. It is a common way of cheering athletes. For individual athletes or entire team, the cheerleaders can raise spirits, strengthen confidence, and set up the players a motivation that “it is not only a win for themselves, they win for more”. It allows individuals competitive spirit more adequate and help them access to get out of the “ego”. Meanwhile, it can strengthen psychological pressure on the rivals and achieve deterrent effects on the rivals. A good cheerleader can even produce “artificial home field advantage.” Athletes are not in home field, but if the cheerleaders can control the visiting field’s audiences, so players can feel they are at home field, thereby enhancing their confidence and strengthen the winning mentality. In fact, friends’ group and fans’ group of athlete stars also can organize cheerleaders to support one athlete or group, and generate the psychological offensive for the rivals.

(2) Show cheerleader:

This cheerleading includes 1-3 minutes long aerobics performance show at opening, midfield transition, or closing. Athletes groups (individual members or groups of members compete with each other) create and improve the environment and atmosphere of the competition. The athletes groups and audience can be affected which let them have feelings of joy and excitement. Often these cheerleaders will show many movements of gymnastics and dances. From a business standpoint, these cheerleaders market has become the mainstream in the current competition matches. Through purposeful selection members, after careful preparation, show cheerleaders can design their movement and adjust the competitive atmosphere of the scene, and inspire athletes to fight attracted the audience’s attention. Many cheerleaders we saw from the TV and newspaper belong to this type.

However, on the other hand, cheerleading may generate some negativeeffects. In a sport context an attention is a vital aspect of athletic performance. As we mentioned from the Broadbent model, to cope with the messages, we have to selectively attend to some information. However, in the competition, inappropriate cheerleading activities can use loudly yelling, or some special color to distribute the athlete’s attention and dampen their enthusiasm. Recently, many experts concluded that cheerleaders may hinder the game— “In games such as gymnastics, aerobics, fraught with difficult moves, such as juggling, tumbling, athletes need to concentrate their attentions, otherwise they will be extremely vulnerable to generate adverse consequences. But sometimes the cheerleaders are hard to realize this point and may generate some negative effects.

Therefore, in practice people should appropriately design and organize the activities of the cheerleaders to let the cheerleaders’ affect the audiences, and strengthen the athletes’ confidence, and enhance the audience’s passions, not to interrupt the athletes’ concentration. In details, based on the schedule of the match, the type of the competition, and the audiences, cheerleading should choose the music, performance actions, and location of performance. On the other hand, the athletes should strength the psychological training to avoid the interference by the cheerleading and audiences.

4. Personal Reflection

In this semester, we first learned many psychological concepts from this course. We took many tests and assignments in the classes. However, only by through writing this essay, we have an opportunity to further understand the concepts that we learned in this course.

In the first place, this course gives me many new ideals about the psychology and widens my horizons. I feel the psychological concepts are useful in our life. For example, people have different personality and mood, which can be determined by their inner world, but can be adjusted by the environment. However, when I write this reflection paper, I reviewed many concepts and chose the most important points which I learned in this paper. To write this paper, I search all kinds of knowledge of the sport psychology. For example, I find some topics as the research of the experiment of sport psychology. Even though the result is very interested, it is not fitful for this paper. When we saw the pictures of cheerleaders from internet, we think it is a good topics to connect the sport psychology to our life, since everyone know what is cheerleader and cheerleading has some psychological principles. We thought this topic and finally choose motivation and cognitive psychology in this paper and consider their applications in sport.

In the second place, from this course we know how important of psychology in the sport. For instance, I am also a player of badminton and I have my personal experience. I understand how important of the mental status in playing badminton. Moreover, understanding some psychological principles can help me improve our performance in the match. Especially when we continuously lose several points in the competition, we should not blame our partner. On the country, we encourage each other with my team players and make ourselves relaxed. In addition, we can ask for my friends to organize one cheerleader for us and encourage us in the match. That is very useful in practice.

Thirdly, I read many papers talking about the connection between the sport injure and the mental issue of athletes. Even this course concentrates on the sport psychology; the principles are still useful for any person. For example, I was very nervous before taking the exam. By from this course, we know that the self-confidence is very important for achieving better performance not only for athletes, but also for students. So this course helps me tread correctly the anxiety and pressure at exams. It helps me understand the mechanism of the anxiety, and teach me how to resolve the anxiety. Therefore, as for this aspect, the course is very useful in practice. In the near future, we would like to apply these principles we learned in this course into practice.

References

Broadbent, D (1958). Perception and Communication. London: Pergamon Press.

Campo-Flores, Arian (2007). “A World of Cheer!”. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/cheerleading-gains-popularity-worldwide-101645.

Cheerleaders of NFL and NBA – Boston Celtics (2014), Pics from

http://www.spox.com/de/sport/diashows/cheearleader-nba-nfl/cheerleader-nfl-nba,seite=23.html

Junge, Astrid (2000), The Influence of Psychological Factors on Sports Injuries, Review of the Literature. Am J Sports Med.2000;28(5 Suppl):S10-5.

Martin, G.N. Carlson, N.R. and Buskist, W. (2010) Psychology. Pearson Educational Press: Harlow, Essex.

Smith, Jennifer Renèe (February 2007). “The All-Star Chronicles”, American Cheerleader13(1): 40–42.

Schmidt, R. A. and Wrisberg, C.A. (2008). Motor learning and performance: A Situation-Based Learning Approach. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Using Psychology to Improve Sports Performance (2014). Retrieved from

www.spicewoodgroup.com/sports_psych.asp.

Weinberg, R. S., & Gould, D. (2011). Foundations of sport and exercise psychology. (5th Ed.)

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