Psychological Skills
This area of research examines how psychological skills influence high level performance, and explores the types of factors that impact on the effectiveness of psychological skill use. The research spans a wide variety of contexts, including sport, education, and extreme environments, and integrates theoretical perspectives from a number of psychological domains (e.g., personality and social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience) in order to best understand how psychological skills exert their effects, and when they can be most useful in aiding performance.
Example publications:
Latinjak, A. T., Hatzigeorgiadis, A., Comoutos, N., & Hardy, J. (2019). Speaking clearly … 10 years on: The case for an integrative perspective of self-talk in sport. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 8(4), 353-367. https://doi.org/10.1037/spy0000160
Arthur, R., Roberts, R., Callow, N., & Glendinning, F. (2019). Coaches Coaching Psychological Skills – Why Not? A Framework and Questionnaire Development. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 41(1), 10-23. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.2017-0198
Callow, N., Edwards, M. G., Jones, A. L., Hardy, L., & Connell, S. (2019). Action dual-tasks reveal differential effects of visual imagery perspectives on motor performance. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(6), 1401-1411. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021818811464
Arthur, R., Fitzwater, J., Roberts, R., Hardy, J., & Arthur, C. (2017). Psychological skills and “the Paras”: The indirect effects of psychological skills on endurance. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 29(4), 449-465. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2017.1306728
Jiang, D., Edwards, M. G., Mullins, P., & Callow, N. (2015). The neural substrates for the different modalities of movement imagery. Brain and Cognition, 97, 22-31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2015.04.005
Hardy, J. T., Blanchfield, A. W., Hardy, J., De Morree, H. M., Staiano, W., & Marcora, S. M. (2014). Talking yourself out of exhaustion: the effects of self-talk on endurance performance. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 46(5), 998-1007. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000000184