What elite men\u27s collegiate tennis coaches look for in recruits and how they assess preferred player characteristics

Understanding what characteristics college tennis coaches look for, and how they evaluate these skills may provide beneficial information related to the recruiting process at the collegiate level. Currently, limited research exists concerning how college tennis coaches evaluate a recruit\u27s intangible characteristics and what specific characteristics they look for. Some authors have suggested that coaches highly value intangible characteristics, such as character and leadership ability, and that these skills are believed to be necessary for success at the collegiate level (Flett, Paule, & Schneider, 2010). However, little is known about the exact processes coaches use to evaluate intangible skills, nor which attributes are viewed as important. Therefore, the purposes of this study were to identify the characteristics that successful NCAA Division I men\u27s tennis coaches look for and to determine how they evaluate these skills. Modified interpretive analysis was utilized to analyze the data (Hatch, 2002), from which two primary themes emerged: what characteristics coaches look for in recruits and how coaches assess a recruit\u27s characteristics. These themes, along with relevant subthemes are discussed in depth and connections are made to existing literature

The Economics of Color: A Null Result

Color research has a long tradition in psychology, consumer behavior, and marketing research. The literature suggests that exposure to colors influences mood and emotions of humans as well as their attitudes towards products. This paper makes two contributions. First, we review the existing literature in science and psychology on the effects of environmental colors (red and blue) on physiological functions, mood, and consumer/economic decision-making, insofar it may be potentially relevant to experimental and behavioral economists. Second, we conduct a laboratory experiment with a typical experimental economics subject pool testing the effects of environmental colors red and blue on decision-making in an incentivized Ultimatum Game experiment. We find no statistically significant effect. However, we also cannot replicate previous results of exposure to colors red and blue on mood as measured by established questionnaire instruments. Our results suggest that experimental economists do not need to worry about the potential confound of colors in economic decision-making.Series: Department of Strategy and Innovation Working Paper Serie

Emotions and cognitive workload in economic decision processes - A NeuroIS Approach

The influence of cognitive and emotions on decision processes have been recently highlighted. Emotions interplay with the process of cognition, and determine decision processes. In this work, the role of external and internal influences on economic decision processes are studied. A NeuroIS method is applied for measuring emotions and cognitive workload. The lack of a suitable experimental platform for performing NeuroIS studies was recognized and the platform Brownie was developed and evaluated

Construal Levels in the Context of Sport Imagery and Performance

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate what role abstract and concrete construal levels play in sport imagery and how they impact sport performance outcomes. Another major purpose was to provide an introduction to a new mixed methods data analysis approach and to apply the developed methodology in the context of a qualitative study investigating construal levels in sport imagery. Three studies were conducted with these purposes in mind. The first study describes a mixed methods analysis of spontaneous sport imagery. 12 elite athletes participated in semi-structured interviews about their experiences with imagery before and during competitive events. Thematic analysis was employed in the qualitative part of the study, and quantitization of co-occurring codes was employed in the quantitative part of the study. Findings from the two data sets were integrated to provide a conclusive whole. Themes that emerged identified athletes’ concrete imagery to focus on strategy generation, error correction, technique, and preparation, and athletes’ abstract imagery to focus on desirability, symbolic and verbal representations, and psychological regulation. Statistical analyses revealed that experienced effectiveness of imagery significantly differed for task type (i.e., sport tasks performed in reactive environments versus in static environments) and competition times (i.e., day before competition, during competition). The second and third studies were conducted based on findings from the first study. 30 participants (16 from table tennis and 14 from a track team, i.e., throwers and long jumpers) participated in the second study, a between-within experimental design, executing their tasks after a baseline condition and two construal level conditions which included verbal distance framings to induce low and high construal levels. 32 participants (16 from badminton and 16 from soccer teams) participated in the third study, also a between-within experimental design, executing soccer penalty shots and badminton rallies, with the verbal framing consisting of feasibility/desirability frames. Participants in the latter study also provided imagery recall information that was analyzed for content. Results from both studies supported the hypotheses that construal levels interact with task types to impact performance outcomes, such that table tennis and badminton players (performing their tasks in reactive environments) performed better in the low construal conditions than the high construal conditions, while throwers, jumpers and soccer penalty kickers (performing their tasks in static environments) performed better in the high construal conditions compared to the low construal conditions. Analysis of the imagery reports indicated that construal level frames impacted the content of athletes’ imagery (in terms of linguistic make-up as well as distance and detail provided); however, imagery did not act as a mediator as no evidence was found that it subsequently impacted performance outcomes

When "hope springs eternal": The role of chance in risk taking

In most naturally occurring situations, success depends on both skill and chance. We contrast experimental market entry decisions where payoffs depend on skill as opposed to combinations of skill and chance. Our data show differential attitudes toward chance by those whose self-assessed skills are low and high. Making chance more important induces greater optimism for the former who start taking more risk, while the latter maintain a belief that high levels of skill are sufficient to overcome the vagaries of chance. Finally, although we observed “excess entry” (i.e., too many participants entered markets), this could not be attributed to overconfidence.Skill, chance, overconfidence, optimism, competition, risk taking, gender differences

Eye quietness and quiet eye in expert and novice golf performance: an electrooculographic analysis

Quiet eye (QE) is the final ocular fixation on the target of an action (e.g., the ball in golf putting). Camerabased eye-tracking studies have consistently found longer QE durations in experts than novices; however, mechanisms underlying QE are not known. To offer a new perspective we examined the feasibility of measuring the QE using electrooculography (EOG) and developed an index to assess ocular activity across time: eye quietness (EQ). Ten expert and ten novice golfers putted 60 balls to a 2.4 m distant hole. Horizontal EOG (2ms resolution) was recorded from two electrodes placed on the outer sides of the eyes. QE duration was measured using a EOG voltage threshold and comprised the sum of the pre-movement and post-movement initiation components. EQ was computed as the standard deviation of the EOG in 0.5 s bins from –4 to +2 s, relative to backswing initiation: lower values indicate less movement of the eyes, hence greater quietness. Finally, we measured club-ball address and swing durations. T-tests showed that total QE did not differ between groups (p = .31); however, experts had marginally shorter pre-movement QE (p = .08) and longer post-movement QE (p < .001) than novices. A group × time ANOVA revealed that experts had less EQ before backswing initiation and greater EQ after backswing initiation (p = .002). QE durations were inversely correlated with EQ from –1.5 to 1 s (rs = –.48 - –.90, ps = .03 - .001). Experts had longer swing durations than novices (p = .01) and, importantly, swing durations correlated positively with post-movement QE (r = .52, p = .02) and negatively with EQ from 0.5 to 1s (r = –.63, p = .003). This study demonstrates the feasibility of measuring ocular activity using EOG and validates EQ as an index of ocular activity. Its findings challenge the dominant perspective on QE and provide new evidence that expert-novice differences in ocular activity may reflect differences in the kinematics of how experts and novices execute skills