Abstract
Background: A large-scale online study completed by this research team found that brief psychological interventions were associated with high-intensity pleasant emotions and predicted performance. The present study extends this work using data from participants (n = 3376) who completed all self-report data and engaged in a performance task but who did not engage with an intervention or control condition and therefore present as an opportunistic no-treatment group. Methods: 41,720 participants were selected from the process and outcome focus goals intervention groups, which were the successful interventions (n = 30,096), active-control (n = 3039), and no-treatment (n = 8585). Participants completed a competitive task four times: first as practice, second to establish a baseline, third following an opportunity to complete a brief psychological skills intervention, and lastly following an opportunity to repeat the intervention. Repeated measures MANOVA indicated that over four performance rounds, the intensity of positive emotions increased, performance improved, and the amount of effort participants exerted increased; however, these increases were significantly smaller in the no-treatment group. Conclusions: Findings suggest that not engaging in active training conditions had negative effects. We suggest that these findings have implications for the development and deployment of online interventions.
Highlights
The effectiveness of psychological skills such as imagery, goal-setting, and self-talk has been demonstrated in many areas of application [1], including sport [2], surgery [3], and computer gaming [4]
They [5] compared the extent to which performance in the 12 intervention conditions improved over four rounds against the control group
Univariate results indicated that emotions became significantly more positive (F 6,125304 = 1328.56, p < 0.0001, partial eta2 = 0.03) following the completion of the intervention
Summary
The effectiveness of psychological skills such as imagery, goal-setting, and self-talk has been demonstrated in many areas of application [1], including sport [2], surgery [3], and computer gaming [4]. The argument for labelling these participants as a control group was that they received no active training. They [5] compared the extent to which performance in the 12 intervention conditions improved over four rounds against the control group. The control group showed greater improvement in performance, felt more energetic, and exerted more mental effort than participants following instructional interventions. The investigators [5] found many participants engaged in all the performance tests but did not engage with the interventions These unused data represent a novel condition and offers opportunistic no-treatment control data against the active control and active-training groups used in the previous study [5]. We hypothesized that the “no-treatment” group would perform significantly worse than the “active-training” and “active-control” groups reported previously [5]
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