UGC NET Physical Education Sports Psychology Flashcards

24 sample cards from the Sports Psychology deck

Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.

1. What does the acronym SMART stand for in goal setting?

   Specific, Measurable, Achievable (Action-oriented), Realistic (Relevant), and Time-bound.

2. Differentiate outcome, performance, and process goals.

   Outcome goals focus on the end result/comparison with others (winning a medal); performance goals focus on personal standards (improving 100m time to 11.5 s); process goals focus on actions/technique (maintaining proper running form).

3. State Locke and Latham's central principle of goal-setting theory.

   Specific and difficult (but attainable) goals lead to higher performance than easy, vague, or 'do your best' goals, provided there is commitment, feedback, and adequate ability.

4. Define personality and its commonly described three-level structure (Hollander).

   Personality is the relatively stable, unique pattern of characteristics that make a person distinct. Hollander's structure: psychological core (innermost, stable values/self), typical responses (usual ways of adjusting), and role-related behaviour (most changeable, situation-driven).

5. Summarise the Psychodynamic (Freudian) theory of personality.

   Personality is driven by unconscious conflicts among three structures: the id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), and superego (morality/conscience), shaped through psychosexual stages.

6. What are the core constructs of Trait theories of personality (Allport, Cattell, Eysenck)?

   Personality consists of stable traits; Cattell identified 16 source traits (16PF), and Eysenck proposed dimensions of Extraversion-Introversion, Neuroticism-Stability, and later Psychoticism.

7. Name the Big Five (Five-Factor Model) personality dimensions.

   Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (mnemonic: OCEAN).

8. What is the central idea of the Interactional approach to personality in sport?

   Behaviour is determined jointly by the person (traits) and the situation/environment: $B = f(P, E)$; neither traits nor situation alone fully predict sporting behaviour.

9. Differentiate the trait, situational, and interactional views as explanations of sport behaviour.

   Trait view: behaviour driven by stable internal traits. Situational view: behaviour driven by environment/reinforcement (Bandura, Skinner). Interactional view: behaviour results from the trait-by-situation interaction, and is the most widely accepted.

10. Distinguish projective from psychometric (questionnaire) methods of measuring personality.

    Projective tests present ambiguous stimuli (Rorschach inkblots, TAT) to reveal unconscious traits, scored subjectively; psychometric inventories use structured self-report items with objective scoring (16PF, EPQ, MMPI).

11. Name two standardized inventories used to measure personality.

    Cattell's Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ); the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is another.

12. What does Morgan's 'Iceberg Profile' describe about elite athletes?

    Using the Profile of Mood States (POMS), successful elite athletes score below average on tension, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion but above average on vigour, forming an iceberg-shaped graph.

13. Define memory and name its three basic processes.

    Memory is the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. The three processes are encoding (registering information), storage (retaining it), and retrieval (recovering it when needed).

14. List the three stages of memory in the Atkinson-Shiffrin multi-store model with their durations.

    Sensory memory (very brief, ~0.5-3 s), Short-term/working memory (~15-30 s, capacity about $7 \pm 2$ items), and Long-term memory (potentially permanent, virtually unlimited capacity).

15. What is Miller's 'magic number' for short-term memory capacity?

    Short-term memory holds about $7 \pm 2$ (five to nine) chunks of information; chunking increases the effective amount stored.

16. Distinguish declarative from procedural long-term memory.

    Declarative (explicit) memory stores facts and events that can be consciously stated (episodic + semantic); procedural (implicit) memory stores skills and how to perform motor actions (e.g., riding a bicycle).

17. Define thinking and list its main types/tools.

    Thinking is the cognitive manipulation of mental representations (images, concepts, symbols) to reason, solve problems, and make decisions; tools include concepts, prototypes, mental images, and language.

18. Differentiate convergent from divergent thinking.

    Convergent thinking seeks the single best/correct solution to a well-defined problem; divergent thinking generates many possible creative solutions and is associated with creativity.

19. Define transfer of training (transfer of learning).

    Transfer of training is the influence (positive or negative) that the learning or practice of one skill has on the learning or performance of another skill or in another situation.

20. Name and define the three main types of transfer of training.

    Positive transfer (prior learning aids new learning, e.g., tennis to badminton), Negative transfer (prior learning hinders new learning, e.g., tennis backswing to squash), and Zero/neutral transfer (no effect).

21. Differentiate proactive from retroactive transfer (and interference).

    Proactive transfer is the effect of earlier learning on later learning; retroactive transfer is the effect of later learning back on earlier-learned material. When the effect is impairing, they are called proactive and retroactive interference.

22. What is bilateral transfer?

    Bilateral transfer (cross-education) is the carry-over of skill learned with one limb/side of the body to the opposite, untrained limb (e.g., practising a throw with the right hand improving the left).

23. What does Thorndike's 'Identical Elements' theory say about transfer?

    Transfer occurs to the extent that the two tasks share identical elements (stimulus and response components); the greater the similarity, the greater the positive transfer.

24. Give one practical implication of transfer of training for sports coaching.

    Coaches should sequence skills and design practice so that lead-up activities maximise positive transfer and minimise negative transfer, making practice conditions resemble the competitive situation (specificity/similarity).

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