Ironic Effects Of Self-talk Under The Different Conditions Of Stress

Ironic effect of self control refers to people produced the unwilling mental state contrast to the willingness in the process of self control under the high pressure.The purpose of this study was to investigate whether negative self-talk used by golf athletes produce ironic effect which may affect the performance in the situation of high pressure caused by external evaluation.The experiment adopts the 2 x 2 between groups design.We selected 40 participates randomly from college golf athletes whose experience was more than one year,then those participants were allocated randomly into the positive self-talk group or the negative self-talk group in the low pressure situation and the high pressure situation.The experiment contains 4groups,there are 10 participants in each group.The operating condition of the high pressure situation is the audiences and golf coach watch and evaluate participants' performance.The purpose of this operation is to simulate the real sports competition which brings large psychological pressure to the athletes.Experiment asked participants to complete two blocks of golf putting task,each block contains 10 times putter.The ball was placed on the 2 meters away from the hole,and the participants were required to hit the ball in the same location.And the target distance we mentioned in this experiment is measured between ball and hole.The first block of golf putting did not use self-talk,the distance was regarded as the baseline.In the second block of golf putting,participants in the positive self-talk groups needed to tell themselves "relax" in their hearts and then speak it lightly before every time they were ready to hit the ball.Similarly,participants in the negative self-talk groups needed to tell themselves "do not be nervous" in their hearts and then speak it lightly before every time they were ready to hit the ball.Two-way ANOVA showed that the main effects of stress and self-talk were significant,and the interact effect between them was also significant.Then,the simple effect analysis showed the dependent variables were no significant difference between the positive self-talk group and the negative self-talk group in the low pressure situation;but,the result was opposite in the high pressure situation.Compared with the low pressure situation,positive self-talk can raise the golf putting performance of participants but negative self-talk can make participants' golf putting performance dropped dramatically in the high pressure situation.In other words,the negative self-talk is easier than positive self-talk to decrease the athletes' performance under stress.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Ironic effects of self control are more likely to happen when the subjects use negative self-talk under high pressure.Therefore,the athletes shoulduse positive self-talk more often to regulate emotion in the sports competition;(2)The golf putting performance of subjects used negative self-talk decrease under high pressure.Therefore,the athletes should use positive self-talk more often in the sports competition,so that the performance will be more stable.