Stay Positive: Self-Talk in Relation to Motivational Climate, Goal Orientation, and Self-Talk Encouragement in Tennis

Positive and negative spontaneous self-talk and performance in gymnastics: The role of contextual, personal and situational factors

“…Some researchers have highlighted some limitations of this instrument, such as the low relationship between the measures reported by the questionnaire and athletes' "in situ" behaviours during the competition [9]. However, in this study, the instrument showed good construct validity through high correlations between how often the athletes used positive spontaneous self-talk in competition, the perception of a mastery climate and the coach's autonomy support [19].…”

“…In the sports field, there is increasing evidence that coach behaviors clearly affect the use of athletes' self-talk. In fact, some studies, like the one developed by Thibodeaux and Winsler [19], found that higher levels of perceived coach mastery climate coincided with more reported use of positive self-talk. In this line, the recent study developed by Ada et al [20] found that the quality of coach-athlete relationships is related to the use of more positive self-talk and negatively to negative self-talk in sport.…”

“…One of the relevant contributions of this work is the study not only of how contextual variables, such as the perception of the motivational climate or the coach-athlete relationship, affect athletes' habitual positive or negative spontaneous sport self-talk but also the analysis of the situational variables related to the frequency of spontaneous organic self-talk occurring in a specific competitive event (spontaneous self-talk "in situ" [19] or situational self-talk.…”

The Role of Big Five Personality Traits, Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction, and Need Frustration in Predicting Athletes’ Organic Self-Talk

“…Sport-specific research on personal antecedents of organic self-talk has shown that achievement goal orientations [19][20][21], autonomous/controlled motivation [10], belief in self-talk [22], and global personality traits such as self-concept [23] and trait anxiety [14] are related to athletes' organic self-talk. Similarly, sport-specific research on situational antecedents of organic self-talk has indicated that match circumstances [8,9,24], practice circumstances [9,25], goal-performance discrepancies [26], competitive setting [9,27,28], pre-competitive state anxiety [26,27], and emotion-eliciting sport situations [7,29] are linked to athletes' organic self-talk.…”

“…Finally, sport-specific research on social-environmental antecedents of organic self-talk has revealed that supportive and unsupportive coaching behaviors [15][16][17], perceived coach's social support [18], perceptions of empowering and disempowering coach-created motivational climate [30], and athletes' perceived satisfaction of Basic Psychological Needs (BPNs; i.e., for autonomy, competence, and relatedness) within their sport environment [10] could shape athletes' organic self-talk. In this point, we should mention that almost all the aforementioned research into the antecedents of athletes' organic self-talk [10,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][26][27][28]30] had been conducted either before researchers distinguished between uncontrolled type (i.e., spontaneous and System 1 self-talk) and controlled type of self-talk (i.e., goal-directed and System 2 self-talk), or before operationalizing these constructs to allow assessment suitable for qualitative methodologies. The only exceptions are Latinjak et al's qualitative studies into the antecedents of athletes' organic, spontaneous [7,29], and goal-directed [7][8][9]25] self-talk, which were conducted after the classification of organic self-talk into these two major categories.…”