Towards effective stress management in sport

Maynard, Ian William (1996) Towards effective stress management in sport. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

The primary aim of this research was to examine the matching hypothesis by direct empirical scrutiny in the sporting setting. It was concluded from this series of investigations that matched or compatible stress management interventions tended to be more effective that non-compatible treatments. Hence, it is recommended that practitioners use a cognitive intervention to treat a cognitive problem, and a somatic strategy to treat a somatic problem. Furthermore, in attempting to develop a rationale for stress management intervention in sport, it was found that a unimodal compatible treatment was as effective as a multimodal intervention on the targeted anxiety modality.

Although the multimodal treatment was found to be most effective overall, the unimodal strategies take less time to deliver to clients. It was therefore suggested that unimodal compatible interventions may prove very beneficial in the short-term, or advantageous for clients presenting with one state anxiety perceived as more problematic than the other. However, for subjects finding both forms of state anxiety a problem, the integrated multimodal strategy may prove more appropriate in the long-term. The final aim of this research involved an assessment of new refinements in the measurement of both anxiety and performance.

The various manipulations and developments of the anxiety or performance measures conducted within this research failed to reliably improve the sensitivity of assessment, or our understanding of the anxiety-performance relationship. Future investigators may wish to widen the scope of the research and examine the relative influence of a variety of cognitions and emotions.

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