1Department of Sport Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Faculty of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, University of Shahid Beheshti, Tehran, Iran
2Professor, Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science and Technology in Sport, Faculty of Sport Sciences and Health, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
3Department of Sport Psychology, Faculty of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
چکیده
Introduction: Mental imagery is one of the psychological skills that sports psychologists recommend athletes focus on. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of mental imagery on anxiety and sports self-efficacy of female adolescent athletes.
Methods: This research was semi-experimental with pretest and post-test design and control group. Sixty female student-athletes of Tehran province (age range 11 to 15 years) were randomly divided into mental imagery and the control group. In the pretest, the competitive state anxiety questionnaire of Martins et al. (1990) and the sports self-efficacy questionnaire of Curl et al. (2007) were answered by both groups. The experimental groups (imaging group) performed mental imagery training for three weeks, and the post-test was performed after the intervention. Data were evaluated by the Leven test to check the normality of data distribution. An independent t-test was used to examine intra-group changes.
Results: The results showed that the difference in competitive anxiety scores between the experimental group that performed the imagery training and the control group that did not receive any intervention was significant (P <0.05). Also, the difference between sports self-efficacy scores between the experimental group that performed the imagery training and the control group that did not receive any intervention was not significant (P> 0.05).
Conclusion: Mental imagery can effectively improve the performance of athletes. In general, it can be concluded that performing imagery training can affect competitive anxiety and sports self-efficacy, but this effect was only significant in competitive anxiety.
