AQA GCSE PE Sports psychology: a complete overview of skill, goals and the mind

Sports psychology is about the mind in sport: how skills are classified and learned, how goals motivate, how performers process information, and how they prepare mentally. It is assessed in Paper 2. This guide maps the five areas.

Skill and goals

Skills are placed on continua because they are rarely purely one type. The basic to complex continuum describes how much thought a skill needs; the open to closed continuum describes how much the environment affects it. A free throw is a fairly complex, closed skill; a pass in a game is an open skill.

Information processing

The basic model has four stages in a loop: input (taking in information through the senses, helped by selective attention), decision making (choosing the response from memory), output (carrying out the movement), and feedback (information about the result that feeds the next decision).

Guidance, feedback and the mind

There are four types of guidance: visual, verbal, manual and mechanical. Feedback can be intrinsic or extrinsic, give knowledge of results or of performance, and be positive or negative. Beginners need visual, manual and positive feedback; experts use verbal and intrinsic feedback.

Mental preparation centres on arousal and the inverted U theory: performance peaks at an optimal moderate level of arousal. Performers manage stress with deep breathing, mental rehearsal and positive self-talk. You should also know direct and indirect aggression, introvert and extrovert personalities, and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

How to revise this topic

1. Learn the two continua and place skills on them.
2. Memorise SMART and the performance versus outcome distinction.
3. Know the four stages of information processing as a loop.
4. Match guidance and feedback to beginners and experts.
5. Learn the inverted U theory and the stress-management techniques.