The Effect Of Positive And Negative Sports Words On Attentional Bias Of Female Athletes

Abstract

During sports practice, the athlete can direct their attention to some events while ignoring others. This tendency is known as attentional bias, which can be influenced by emotions, impacting judgment and decision-making and, consequently, sports performance. PURPOSE: To analyze emotional distraction information in the inhibition performance between female athletes. METHODS: Eighteen futsal players ((FP - Mage = 20.61 ± 4.27, Msport experience = 9.89 ± 4.51 years) and fifteen rhythmic gymnasts (RG - Mage = 17.76 ± 3.42, Msport experience = 7.64 ± 3.41 years) participated in this study. They have performed the sport emotional Stroop task (SEST) to measure attentional processing of emotional task-irrelevant stimuli. The task included 180 trials presented in a randomized order of neutral, positive, and negative sports words (behavioral responses were computed). RESULTS: Comparing the SEST interference score to zero, the One-sample t test for RG revealed a significant interference effect for negative word occurred [t(14) = 2.40, p = .031], demonstrating an emotion-induced attentional bias, but not to positive sports words (p = .60). For the FP there was no significant difference in emotional interference effect for negative sports words (p = .25) and positive sports words (p = .77). There was no significant interaction between groups*words in SEST (p > 0,05) found through the ANOVA for repeated measures, but in general female athletes were slowly at negative sports words than neutral sport words responses [F(2, 62) = 4.08, p = .03). Means and standard deviations were presented in table 1. CONCLUSION:Negative sports words increased reaction time and attentional bias, mostly in RG. Improves emotional control is important because it can decrease attentional processing and sports performance.