This chapter addresses the key principles of sport, exercise, and performance psychology. It reflects the broadening of sport psychology studies to encompass more widespread human performance research. It provides Dr. Sachs’s honest and open remarks along with interspersed additions from the authors to introduce the field and its accompanying issues. In explaining his career trajectory, Dr. Sachs recalls earning his undergraduate degree in psychology and then applying to graduate programs in applied behavioral analysis. Dr. Sachs’s somewhat zigzagged trajectory in the field demonstrates the important sport and exercise psychology principle that explains the benefits of focusing on the process rather than the outcome when setting goals. Dr. Sachs added that the United States leads the way in research and writing with regard to sport and exercise psychology, while other countries may be more advanced in the application of that knowledge at the professional levels.

This chapter addresses the key principles of sport, exercise, and performance psychology. It reflects the broadening of sport psychology studies to encompass more widespread human performance research. The topic of decision making has been covered in psychology, economics, and motor learning but addressed very sparsely in sport, exercise, and performance psychology. Rational decision making requires defining the problem, identifying criteria, weighing those criteria, generating alternative solutions, and ultimately computing the optimal decision. The chapter introduces the literature on decision making and provides examples of factors that influence the choices people make. The decision to act, move, or what move to make is decided in the response selection stage, and the final stage is when one’s brain and muscles are organized to make the actual move. The key to improve the decision-making over time is to increase personal awareness of own limitations and keep learning and collecting information from reliable sources.

One of the most important findings from the original battered woman syndrome (BWS) research was the existence of a three-phase cycle of violence that could be described and measured through careful questioning of the battered woman. This chapter describes the cycle, updates it by adding information from the courtship period, and divides the third phase into several different sections where appropriate so that there may not be any loving contrition or even respites from the abuse at times during the relationship. Teaching the woman how her perception of tension and danger rises to an acute battering incident after which she experiences feelings of relief and then gets seduced back into the relationship by the batterer’s loving behavior, often similar to what she experienced during the courtship period, has been found to be helpful in breaking the cycle of violence that keeps the woman in the relationship.

This chapter aims to give the behavioral health specialist (BHS) a basic understanding of pain, knowledge about how to effectively evaluate chronic pain, and a description of effective pain management techniques. Knowledge of the biological and psychological basis of pain is important to understanding the experience of chronic pain. A biopsychosocial assessment is the foundation for providing behavioral health treatment to the chronic pain patient. Chronic pain is less responsive to treatments commonly used for acute pain such as opioid analgesia and avoiding physical activity. A multidisciplinary team approach can substantially improve outcomes in chronic pain treatment. Whatever the format of service provision, utilizing multiple interventions such as physical therapy/exercise, emotional management, pacing, and medication, rather than a single modality can substantially improve outcomes for chronic pain. Providing psychoeducation about chronic pain can be an important strategy.

The primary purpose of Module 3 of the MAC program is the understanding and exploration of values as a central orienting concept. In the context of understanding the important role of values in enhanced performance and quality of life, the functional and dysfunctional role of emotions is also considered. This chapter suggests to clients that their personal values will be the anchor point for all behavioral decisions that need to be made in the course of enhancing performance and achieving goals. The concepts of mindful awareness, mindful attention, and cognitive fusion and cognitive defusion become integrated with the concept of values-directed versus emotion-directed behavior. The Relevant Mindful Activity Exercise is intended to connect the mindfulness concept to a relevant performance situation in the client’s life. The question of personal values is particularly salient when confronted by the variety of emotions and internal rules that client confronts on a daily basis.

The long-term use of benzodiazepines causes severe cognitive and neurological impairments, atrophy of the brain, and dementia, and the newer sleep aids should be considered a potential but unproven risk in this regard. Some of the most severe cases of chronic brain impairment (CBI) occur after years of exposure to benzodiazepines. This chapter examines the risk of increased mortality associated with benzodiazepines and closely-related sleep aids when given in relatively small doses for short periods of time in the treatment of insomnia. All of the benzodiazepines and the more common prescribed sleep aids are addictive. Opiate and opioid withdrawal tends to be more predictable than psychiatric drug withdrawal. Like the abuse of stimulants and benzodiazepines, abuse of opiates and opioids can result in unlawful acts. The chapter addresses legally used opioids, involving mild-to-moderate abuse or dependence as found in patients who can often be safely withdrawn in an outpatient setting.

This chapter presents a case study on performance dysfunction in the case of a 21-year-old African American female basketball player entering her senior year at a major Division I-level university. She described regret about not working out harder during the off-season, which she blamed for a poor start to her current season. In addition, she also reported feeling a great deal of worry over the possibility that she may have a poor season and ruin her chance to be drafted in the first round of the WNBA entry draft. According to the case formulation model, there are 10 elements that are necessary to consider prior to making an intervention decision contextual performance demands; skill level; situational demands; transitional and developmental issues; psychological characteristics/performance and nonperformance schemas; attentional focus; cognitive responses; affective responses; behavioral responses; and readiness for change and level of reactance.

Coverage of obesity in the popular press has reached a fever pitch in recent years. By far, the most common definition of obesity uses the body mass index (BMI) to determine who is overweight or obese. A person's BMI is a ratio of his or her weight to height. Many times BMI is criticized for the false positives, where very muscular people are deemed to be obese despite ultralow body fat levels. Waist circumference or waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) measures something called “abdominal or central obesity”, a condition that is closely related to negative health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease. The costs to society of obesity and related health issues are tremendous. Women, ethnic and racial subgroups, and those of low socioeconomic status (SES) all display higher rates of obesity than the overall population. Obesity is much more common in certain racial and ethnic subpopulations, as compared with Caucasian Americans.

This chapter presents the theoretical and empirical rationale for the development of an innovative intervention for the enhancement of performance. The mindfulness-acceptance-commitment (MAC) approach to performance enhancement is based on an integration of mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches and is specifically tailored for high-performing clientele. The predominant psychological approaches have emphasized the development of self-control of internal states such as thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations and have been commonly referred to as psychological skills training (PST) procedures. The self-regulatory PST procedures most often discussed are goal-setting, imagery/mental rehearsal, arousal control, self-talk modification, and precompetitive routines. The efficacy of psychological skills training techniques and procedures for performance enhancement has been most carefully evaluated within the context of athletic performance enhancement. Mindfulness can be seen as the process that promotes greater awareness of internal experiences and the defusion of one’s thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations.