Methods in Cognitive Sport Psychology

This chapter discusses the methodological approaches to measuring cognitive states and patterns in sport psychology. The measurement of “thoughts” enables us to comprehend human emotional states and behavioural tendencies. Cognitive psychology pertains to the study of the mind, and cognition refers to “mental operations involving information processing and thus includes processes such as perception, problem solving, memory recall, and decision making”. Sport psychologists should keep in mind that cognitive states and patterns are entangled with affective and behavioural states and patterns, something that has been called the “cognitive-affective-behavioural linkage”. The measurement and interpretation of cognition are complex matters that extend beyond the understanding of reliability and validity. Reliable measurement of cognitive variables is required to advance theoretical models, which, in turn, must inform practice. In addition to studying performance through the above-mentioned paradigms, sport psychologists are also interested in studying how people learn.