Contemporary Sport Psychology

Section One is comprised of practical application, Within Section One the reader will find contributions pertaining to applied practice with Olympic and professional athletes based upon the first hand experiences of elite practitioners from several continents. The intent through section one is to propose strategies, reflecting several national perspectives that applied practitioners might employ as they enter the field or seek positions with elite sport organizations in the global sport community.

Contemporary Advances in Sport Psychology brings together leading international researchers to showcase some of the most important emerging topics in contemporary sport psychology. Each chapter offers a comprehensive review of current knowledge and research on a cutting-edge theme, followed by in-depth discussion of conceptual and methodological issues, and then outlines potential avenues for further research. The book covers themes including: Contemporary personality perspectives Choking models of stress and performance Coping in sport Relational-efficacy beliefs Self-determination theory Transformational leadership Organizational psychology in sport Quantitative and qualitative methods in sport psychology The review format provides the perfect entry point for all researchers, advanced students or practitioners looking to engage with the latest research themes in contemporary sport psychology, offering a greater depth of discussion than the typical journal article. Informing knowledge generation, applied research and professional practice, Contemporary Advances in Sport Psychology is an essential addition to any sport science library.

I welcome you to the 2014 accepted writings of Athletic Insight. The ordering of papers does not match with the sequence in which they were released. Rather, I chose to do something a little different in this, my final year as Editor and Chief of Athletic Insight. What the reader finds in this most recent compendium of Athletic Insight writings is nineteen papers, beginning with the most recently accepted as parts of the Autumn, 2014 edition of the journal. Afterward, I reordered the remaining accepted papers so that they made the whole of the book more coherent to the readership. Briefly, there were a significant number of papers submitted to Athletic Insight from India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Sweden, Norway, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Several of these papers were screened out even before they were sent out to editorial board members or guest reviewers for a thorough peer evaluation. Those that were deemed acceptable were then farmed out to scholars well versed in the various topics submitted to the journal. The topics submitted spanned coaching, motor learning and sport psychology intersections, youth sport, elite amateur sport, professional sport, cultural sport psychology, and various aspects relating to exercise psychology. This diversity in subject matter confirms what I have always known that Athletic Insight is inclusive and open to a breadth of topics, critical scholarship, and emerging and contentious issues pertinent today within the sphere of sport and exercise psychology.

Sport Psychology is an essential introduction to the field's key issues, suitable for psychology, sport science and sport studies students at all levels. Encompassing the history of sport psychology to more recent distinctions between sport and exercise psychology, it is ideal reading for students looking to learn about issues such as motivation, concentration and anxiety and the connection between physical activity and psychological well-being. This new edition provides updated case studies, guidance on further reading, study questions and brand new content on self-harm in sport and metaimagery. Real-life examples put the theory into practice, and the authors' focus on the freshest theories shows how the discipline has evolved in recent years.