The establishment of construct validity in the context of sport psychological assessment and intervention requires the identification of valid functional mind-body origins or bases of athlete psychological responses and associated performance tendencies during training or competition. Finding additional links between heart rate deceleration (HRD) and concomitant brain activity parameters leading up to action that are also associated with performance outcome would be an extension finding in the construct validation process. Irrespective of whether a practitioner subscribes to the Brain-Heart-Mind-Body-Motor (BHMBM) and its interrelated Athlete’s Profile (AP) and Theory of Critical Moments (TCM) models of peak performance, construct validity should be considered when deciding what assessment instrument to use or intervention to apply. The chapter also presents a comprehensive and integrative explication of key components of the Carlstedt Protocol’s (CP) validated athlete assessment and intervention system.

This chapter presents the athlete’s profile (AP) in an applied context and reviews the primary higher order (PHO) measures that it encompasses and their impact on performance. It describes test instruments, applications/administration, psychometrics and methodology. The AP model is a conceptual and explanatory framework that predicts athlete psychological performance tendencies during pressure situations of competition. The conceptual origins of the AP can be traced to the High Risk Model of Threat Perception (HRMTP) and its isolation of the three so-called subject variables, hypnotic susceptibility (HS), neuroticism (N), and repressive coping (RC). These measures were shown to interact to mediate maladaptive cognitive processing/attention, physiological reactivity, and subliminal coping and resulting symptoms and/or illness. As such, the AP battery should only be administered in the context of a comprehensive athlete evaluation and intervention efficacy testing process.

The manipulation of cerebral laterality is a validated brain-based experimental procedure that can be used to induce rapid changes in emotional states associated with potentially disruptive athlete’s profile (AP) constellations as well as brain hemispheric shifts in the preaction to action transition. Priming or stimulating the right visual and blocking the left visual field using special goggles/glasses is an experimental cerebral laterality manipulation (CLM) intervention that has been associated with demonstrated intervention efficiency and efficacy. CLM manipulation can also be directly applied to facilitate the well-documented pre-action relative to left-to-right hemispheric shifts associated with peak performance responses, especially in athletes who have an ideal AP or more ambiguous hemispheric valence profiles. The manipulation of visual-field input leads to activation of the contralateral brain hemisphere and unequivocal evidence of intervention efficiency that is hard to demonstrate for most mental training modalities.