The Experimental Study On Decision Making In Volleyball Situation

Sports decision-making is one of the most important human senior intelligent activitiesin sports. In recent years, researches on sport decision-making and related problems havebecome the focus in Sport Psychology field. However, further theoretical and empiricalresearches will be expected because of the limitations in present theories, reseach contentsand methods of sports decision-making, such as the studies whether athletes of differentlevels in all sports possess the ablities of cognitive decision and intuitive decision and howathletes’ sports decision-making be influenced by their personal characteristics and mentalstates.Therefore, Expert-novice Paradigm and Affective-priming Paradigm will be used in thisstudy in order to explore the characteristics of cognitive decision and intuitive decision involleyball situation, the difference of sports decision-making between experts and novices,and the influence of different emotional states on sports decision-making.There are two experiments that integrate each other in this study.Twelve athletes of Northwest Normal University volleyball team and12universitystudents that have attended the volleyball elective course more than36hours participated inexperiment1, and each group was evenly divided between male and female. The types ofdecision-making tasks were manipulated to investigate the characteristics of cognitivedecision and intuitive decision in volleyball situation and the differences of sportsdecision-making between experts and novices as well as between the male and female.Experiment2involved24volleyball athletes from Northwest Normal University,Lanzhou University and Lanzhou City University, and evenly divided between male andfemale. The types of affective priming materials and decision-making tasks weremanipulated to investigate the influence of different emotional states on the athletes’cognitive decision and intuitive decision, and the difference of sports decision-makingbetween the male and female after affected by different affective priming materials.The results showed that:1）the performance and self-confidence in cognitive decisionwere better than that in intuitive decision;2）the decision-making performance of expertswere better than that of novices, suggested that experts achieved a balance between the speedand veracity of decision-making;3）this study confirmed that using Affective-priming Paradigm in sports decision-making was feasible and effective;4）the decision-makingperformances of the positive affective priming group and the control group were better thanthat of the negative affective priming group, and the decision-making veracity of the controlgroup was better than that of positive affective group, while there was no significantdifferences in the decision speed and self-confidence, suggested that sports decision-makingwas indeed influenced by emotional states.