Quote:
Originally Posted by Major Major
The truth is, I haven't read many, or at least none that produce hard sets of data. My comment on the consensus had to do with me talking with licensed sports psychologists. They would say things like, fear-bad, confidence-good.
I guess I took to thinking, you know, based on conversations with sports psychologists, a lifetime of observations and experience, and lets see... oh right, common sense that confidence and security had a positive correlation with performance in just about any field.
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Not to be too pedantic, but the term/discipline is "sport psychology" (although, to be honest, most folks have moved to the broader descriptor of "performance psychology").
And the whole notion of "fear-bad, confidence-good" is entirely too simplistic. The relationship between confidence and performance is anything but linear; similarly, research examining the relationship between various emotional states (e.g., fear, anxiety, joy, anger) and sport performance does not indicate that such relationships are linear.
I'd never claim that fighting in hockey has no effect on performance from a psychological perspective. However, there is such a paucity of research in this area that one cannot claim with any sense of certainty that fighting produces significant psychological benefits for the team.