Aim: The aim of this study was to implement a psychological skills training program for dancers and evaluate the dancers’ use of psychological skills training techniques, and possible effects of the course. Specifically, the present study examined: 1) to what extent the dancers were using psychological skills training techniques; 2) whether a short course in psychological skills training for dancers made any difference to their use of psychological skills training techniques; 3) whether differences existed between groups of dancers regarding year at the dance academy, previous education in psychological skills training, and attendance; 4) the dancers’ response to psychological skills training during the course. Method: 51 dancers (45 female and six male aged 18-26 years) at a dance academy in Sweden participated in the study. The course in psychological skills training stretched over four months with four to six lessons. A shortened version of the Test of Performance Strategies was completed by the dancers at the first and last lesson. Descriptive statistics, one-way between-groups analysis of variance (ANOVA), and paired-samples t-tests were used to analyze the data. Memoing was practised to document the dancers’ direct response to the course. Results: The dancers used self-talk, emotional control, goal setting, imagery, activation, and attentional control “sometimes” in connection with their dance practice, whereas relaxation was used “rarely”. The total score for the dancers’ use of psychological skills training techniques only showed a marginal increase between pre- and post-intervention data. The only statistically significant difference found was an increase in the scores for relaxation. No statistically significant difference was found between groups regarding total score. The results from the memoing indicated that active participation during the lessons resulted in a more positive attitude towards psychological skills training, and that the dancers used different vocabulary regarding psychological skills training. The dancers also expressed difficulties implementing psychological skills training techniques on their own outside the classroom. Conclusions: The dancers in the present study had very similar scores on the questionnaire compared to athletes in previous research. For future research it would be of interest to see if a longer psychological skills training program for dancers, or a course with higher intensity, could further facilitate the dancers’ use of psychological skills training techniques, as well as integrate psychological skills training more in their dance practice. The results from this study could provide valuable information for further development of a psychological skills training program for dancers and might serve as a guide for areas that could benefit from extra attention in order to help dancers evolve both professionally and personally.

Programa de Pós Graduação em Engenharia Civil. Departamento de Engenharia Civil, Escola de Minas, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto. / Submitted by Oliveira Flávia (flavia@sisbin.ufop.br) on 2016-01-14T15:41:06Z No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE_QualitativeInvestigationPerformance.pdf: 28313982 bytes, checksum: 7fa9b21301ee73fcec79f7676cdc021f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Gracilene Carvalho (gracilene@sisbin.ufop.br) on 2016-01-14T17:57:17Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE_QualitativeInvestigationPerformance.pdf: 28313982 bytes, checksum: 7fa9b21301ee73fcec79f7676cdc021f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-14T17:57:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE_QualitativeInvestigationPerformance.pdf: 28313982 bytes, checksum: 7fa9b21301ee73fcec79f7676cdc021f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / This paper provides a qualitative investigation about the structural performance of the membranes, surface structures (with double curvature in opposite directions) with minimum thickness and weight, which absorb forces in form of tensile stresses in its own plane, considering two aspects: structural and design procedure. Initially, it involved the analyses of lightweight structure buildings and the observation of constructive work process in membrane roofs. These investigations allowed identifying strategies that contribute to achieve optimum system performance and the challenges encountered along the stages of designing and building. They also guided the qualitative analysis of the performance of a structural membrane roofing project, i.e., a particular situation, as example. This qualitative analysis was developed in two stages, guided by experimental and numerical data. The first stage involved the optimization procedure of the structural system under load action. This analysis showed that the flexible system performance is a result of the three-dimensional stability of the structural system (arrangement and geometry of all components), membrane surface stiffness (membrane geometry), as well as the cooperation of all components in pre-tension state. The second stage comprised the experimental investigation of the membrane material behaviour within the structure context in order to analyze the flattened membrane geometry. Such evaluation enabled to verify the difference between the theoretical model (shape of equilibrium) and the actual shape (consisting of flat panels), enabling the proper adjustment of the surface geometry so that the final shape can reveal not only the path of the forces, but also the best use of the material. The investigations, analyses and working procedure here adopted broadened the understanding of this system pointing possibilities to increase its performance and to minimize failures during the preliminary stage of design.

Background: What are mental methods, and what kind of utility do you have for using these techniques? Team player and individual athletes are different from the beginning by the way they do there sports, but is there similarities or is it only differences between them. These two sports that will be presented are track and field and basketball and there use of mental methods.Intention: Investigate whether there is any difference between the uses of mental techniques in an individual sport than a team sport?Method: To collect data, TOPS (Test of performance strategies) written by Thomas, Murphy & Hardy (1999) questionnaire form will be the basis for the questions. TOPS is a questionnaire with 10 mental techniques, this study will focus on three of them, goal setting, visualization and pep-talk. To secure that the answers would be as properly answered as possible, were paper questionnaire given personally to every participants.Result: Mental techniques are used by athletes in both team sports and individual sports; however, there is no significant difference between the two athlete groups. The results in this study showed that goalsetting were almost used the same amount between individual athletes and team players. It was however a bigger different between the use of pep-talk and visualization, where team players used more pep-talk while individual athletes were using more the visualization technique. During a comparison between the different sports, the results showed that basketball players in this study were using more pep-talk, while the track and field, and mostly the throwers were using more of visualization.Discussion: The results that have been acknowledge in this study shows that all three mental techniques are used by both individual and team players. My personal thoughts were that the results would give opposite results about visualization and pep-talk between team sports and individual sports. The reason behind these results might be because of that team players, and by that mostly basketball players, have more use of visualize a special technique situation, like throwing a ball, while an individual athlete, in this study track and field athletes, have more use of pep-talk both before and during a race, because they might need more motivational speech to finish the race.

The purpose of this study was to examine the factorial validity and measurement equivalence of the Test of Performance Strategies (TOPS; Thomas, Murphy, & Hardy, 1999); the Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS; Smith, Smoll, & Schultz, 1990); and the Golf Performance Survey (GPS; Thomas & Over, 1994) across age groups in a representative sample of amateur golfers. Based on archival data, participants comprising this study were 649 younger adult (n = 237) and older adult (n = 412) amateur golfers who played in the Dupont World Amateur Golf Championship in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The participants completed a set of questionnaires including psychological skills and strategies (e.g., self-talk, goal setting, imagery, etc.) used during competition, sport-specific competitive trait anxiety, and psychomotor skills and involvement in golf. Results demonstrated that the original factor structure of the TOPS competition subscale, the SAS, and the GPS, did not adequately fit the data among this sample of younger and older adult amateur golfers. Further exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses established evidence of factorial validity with the TOPS competition subscale, SAS, and the GPS with both younger and older adult amateur golfers. Configural, metric, scalar, and strict measurement invariance were identified in relation to the TOPS competition subscale, SAS, and the GPS across age cross-group comparisons. In general, the analyses demonstrated support that the TOPS competition subscale, SAS, and the GPS can be utilized with confidence with older adult amateur golfers, as well as conducting group comparisons with younger adult amateur golfers. The findings from this study have several future research directions and practical implications for structuring effective interventions with older adult amateur athletes.