Sport and Exercise Psychology: Understanding Cognitive and Biological Factors.

This chapter utilises examples to discuss cognitive and biological constructs relevant for sport and exercise psychologists. At the outset, it is worth noting that these are vast topics and we are being selective, with a criterion for our selectivity a goal to produce an interesting chapter that inspires further reading. We have certainly not produced a comprehensive review, but an introductory review. The first section describes self-efficacy. We then look at memory, particularly memories of thoughts and feelings experienced when we perform well and how these differ from when we perform poorly. We look at how our feelings can influence this process and the notion that if you are in a happy mood, it is easier to recall events when you were happy. As a great deal of consultancy in sport and exercise psychology involves discussing issues with clients, memory is very important. Lane (2020) has recently authored a chapter on emotions in the consultancy process and recognition of how much the consultant should be aware of the emotion–memory connection when considering how to interpret information from a client.

We continue by examining concentration and decision-making. Following this, we have a brief discussion on stress and emotion. Such a discussion on this topic is clearly not extensive enough, as many additional theoretical explanations could be forwarded; but decision-making is key to performance, key to making good decisions in exercise and in general life.

Second, we explore factors such as diet, extreme environments, and physical fitness to look at relationships between physiological and psychological states. We conclude the chapter by acknowledging clinical issues, with a focus on eating disorders. We touch on these topics and our developing research in this area (Ruiz et al., 2021; Devonport et al., 2019). Our emotions play a central role in well-being, and what and why we eat can have a direct effect on our health. This can be complicated when our eating habits become emotion regulation strategies. Eating is relevant to practitioners, athletes, exercisers, and the general public, and therefore, we begin the journey of encouraging researchers to consider focusing on this as their specialism.