Psychological Momentum

Psychological Momentum (PM) is a positive or negative dynamics of cognitive, affective, motivational, physiological, and behavioral responses to the perception of movement toward or away from either a desired or an undesired outcome. Such a perception can be fostered by any event or series of events that alters the perceived rate at which one is moving regarding the outcome in question. The history and the context in which such events are embedded determine the occurrence and intensity of PM more determining than the events per se. Therefore, PM is a process of extrapolation that builds upon experiences and extends to anticipated future outcomes (e.g., Hubbard, 2015). PM should not be confused with the “hot/cold hand” phenomenon, which refers to the belief that streaks of success/failure breed future success/failure. The occurrence of streaks is neither sufficient nor necessary to entail a perception of movement toward or away from a final outcome

Perceiving affordances in sports through a momentum lens

In this experimental study, we tested whether athletes’ judgments of affordances and of environmental features vary with psychological momentum (PM). We recruited golf, hockey, and tennis players, who were assigned to a positive or negative momentum condition. We designed a golf course on which participants made practice putts, after which they were asked to place the ball at their maximum “puttable” distance and to judge the hole size. Next, participants played a golf match against an opponent, in which the first to take a lead of 5 points would win the match. Participants were told that they could win a point by making the putt or by being closest to the hole. They wore visual occlusion goggles to prevent them from seeing the actual result, and the experimenter manipulated the scoring pattern to induce positive or negative PM. Participants in the positive momentum condition came back from a four-point lag to a four-point lead, whereas those in the negative momentum condition underwent the opposite scenario. We then asked the participants again to indicate their maximum puttable distance from the hole and to judge the hole size. After the manipulation, participants judged the maximum puttable distance to be longer in the positive momentum condition and shorter in the negative momentum condition. For the hole-size judgments, there were no significant effects. These results provide first indications for the idea that athletes’ affordances change when they experience positive PM compared to negative PM. This sheds a new light on the dynamics of perception-action processes and PM in sports

Visualizing individual dynamics:The case of a talented adolescent

Research on talent and performance development has primarily focused on inter-individual differences. However, research suggests that performance and the underlying determinants change over time, in an individual-specific dynamic way. This chapter illustrates a method to measure, understand, and visualize the performance- and psychosocial dynamics of a talented adolescent athlete. During one season, a talented tennis player filled out an online diary questionnaire twice a week. We visualized the results using R-scripts that we made openly available. This facilitated the interpretation of the athlete’s performance- and psychosocial dynamics, which are influenced by particular events in the athlete’s life. Altogether, the current study provides insight into how the adolescent and the context interact and mutually affect each other in successive iterations

The development of talent in sports:A dynamic network approach

Understanding the development of talent has been a major challenge across the arts, education, and particularly sports. Here, we show that a dynamic network model predicts typical individual developmental patterns, which for a few athletes result in exceptional achievements. We first validated the model on individual trajectories of famous athletes (Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Sidney Crosby, and Lionel Messi). Second, we fitted the model on athletic achievements across sports, geographical scale and gender. We show that the model provides good predictions for the distributions of grand slam victories in tennis (male players, n = 1528; female players, n = 1274), major wins in golf (male players, n = 1011; female players, n = 1183), goals scored in the NHL (ice hockey, n = 6677) and in FC Barcelona (soccer, n = 585). The dynamic network model offers a new avenue toward understanding talent development in sports and other achievement domains

Nonergodicity in protective factors of resilience in athletes

Resilience is a key construct to understand when athletes continue to perform optimally, or when they break down. Although there is consensus that resilience can be conceptualized as a dynamic process, it remains an open question whether studying such a process on a group level adequately represents the individuals within a given sample. As a first step to answer this question, we designed a diary study to test whether the statistics for repeated assessments of protective factors and resilience can be generalized from group-level trajectories to the individuals. By tracking resilience and the protective factors over 21 days in athletes, we found divergent patterns of group-level and individual-level statistics for the repeated assessments. This so-called "ergodicity problem" implies that the individual, rather than the group, should be placed at the level of analysis to avoid wrong conclusions and ineffective interventions on their resilience