Date of Submission
Spring 2023
Academic Program
Psychology
Project Advisor 1
Sarah Dunphy-Lelii
Project Advisor 2
Frank Scalzo
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Maximizing athletic performance in college athletes has been a topic of discussion in the world of sports psychology for decades. Awareness of the effect one's mindset can have on performance has increased, begging the question of how we can manipulate the mind to avoid failure in performance. A significant contributor of failure in athletic performance can be attributed to one communicating negatively with themself during an event, this is often referred to in the sport psychology literature as self-talk. Self-talk are the words and thoughts that are generated during performance subconsciously. Negative self-talk can take one’s focus away from their present goal. Positive self-talk can help athletes remain confident and on point throughout their performance. This relationship becomes increasingly difficult to manage during pressure situations such as games, practices or tryouts. There have been studies in the past that have looked at the effects of positive and negative self talk on various sports; tennis, golf, corn-hole, darts. What these studies failed to account for is the concept of pressure from spectators that is faced during performance. The aim of this project is to assess the effect that different forms of self-talk have on dart throwing performance, while also assessing the effect of self-talk in pressure situations using the presence of spectators. This project was completed with the absence of IRB approval. In light of this, the results presented herein should be considered the product of an academic exercise and not generalizable human subjects research.
Open Access Agreement
On-Campus only
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Bruns, Tyler J., "The Heckler Within: Maximizing Athletic Performance in Spectator Situations Using Self-Talk Mechanisms" (2023). Senior Projects Spring 2023. 66.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2023/66
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
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