ABSTRACT:
This book implicates constellations of personality traits and behaviors as mediators of key elements of peak performance including physiological reactivity, attention, and certain cognitive processes. It also identifies several neurophysiological concomitants of these measures and demonstrates how they interact to influence and sustain focus or allow disruptive negative thoughts to interfere with levels of attention required for peak performance. The model provides a long overdue lucid and highly plausible explanation for the dynamics of focus and effects of intrusive cognitions on sport performance.
The model advanced in this book explained up to 44% of the variance in objective outcome measures, well exceeding previous attempts to account for performance on the basis of personality and behavioral measures.
The author Roland A. Carlstedt persuasively demonstrates that isolating more sensitive predictor and criterion measures is crucial in order to explain more of the variance in the performance equation that can be attributed to psychological factors.
Readers of this book will be exposed to a novel and brilliant approach to the delineation and analysis of outcome measures that capture the essence of peak mental performance in sport, something previous research has failed to do.
The model also undertook the first attempt to quantify so-called zone or flow experiences on the basis of objective and longitudinally derived psychophysiological and performance outcome measures. These measures were obtained during actual official athletic competition, lending an unprecedented level of ecological validity to his model and data. For example, provocative findings on heart rate variability in athletes suggest that specific parameters of heart rate variability may mirror zone or flow states.
This book provides a scientific basis and empirical evidence that accounts for numerous anecdotal notions and platitudes in these theories and sport in general including “just do it,” “ideal performance state,” “mental toughness,” sport is “90% mental,” among others. Carlstedt has traveled where no researcher has ventured in quantifying these slogan statements, contentions, and myths, bringing new insights and data as to their meaning.
