The effect of motivational and instructional self-talk on athlete anxiety, motivational level and football shooting performance / Nurhasni Mohd Noor

The greatness of football players depends not exclusively on skills but also involved with the psychological factors. Therefore, this experimental study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of self-talk intervention on state anxiety, motivation and shooting performance among Malaysian Sports School Footballers. A total of 108 experience footballers between 14 and 17 years old (M = 16.01, SD = 1.02) participated in this study. Participants were divided into three groups; Motivational self-talk (MST), Instructional self-talk (IST), and control (C) groups. Besides their regular physical practice, participants in the MST and IST groups involved in the eight weeks of self-talk intervention. This intervention was carried out before each training session. Each footballer in MST and IST groups was given a self-talk guide according to their type of self-talk intervention. This study used The Revised Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2R) to measure anxiety dimensions, the Sports Motivation Scale (SMS) to measure footballer’s motivation dimension, the Functions of Self-Talk Questionnaire (FSTQ) to assess the functions of self-talk and the 356 Soccer Shooting Test (356 SST) to measure shooting skill performance dimensions during the pre-test, mid intervention test, and post-test. The data will analyse by using computer software, Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 23. Results revealed that for state anxiety, there was a significant interaction between time and group for cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and self-confidence suggesting that groups practising self-talk were likely to reduce cognitive and somatic anxiety and increase self-confidence compare to control group. Findings for motivation showed that there was significant time main effect and group main effect in intrinsic motivation subscale indicated that self-talk intervention significantly increases the level of intrinsic motivation subscales among football players. The results of shooting skills performance for the dominant leg revealed a significant time main effect of the shooting accuracy, ball velocity, and shooting quality. The tests conducted for non-dominant shooting skills showed that there was significant time main effect of the shooting accuracy, ball velocity, and shooting quality but no significant difference between group across three assessments. Meanwhile, the relationship between MST and motivation dimensions showed that confidence, automaticity, cognitive and emotional control, and effort significantly correlated with intrinsic motivation. MST and dominant shooting skills revealed a significant correlation between effort and three shooting skills namely shooting accuracy, ball velocity and shooting quality. Non-dominant shooting skills shows that shooting accuracy was significantly correlated with confidence and attention in MST function of self-talk. Correlation analysis in IST group to determine the relationship between self-talk and state anxiety showed that only self-confidence has a significant correlation with self-talk subscales particularly with cognitive and emotional control, attention and effort. Meanwhile, IST and motivation dimensions revealed that all self-talk subscales were significantly correlated with intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation but not with amotivation. There was no significant correlation found between all self-talk subscales and shooting skills for both dominant and non-dominant within IST group. Overall, the present study provides valuable empirical evidence regarding state anxiety and motivation effects of self-talk as a key factor explaining the effectiveness of self-talk interventions on young athletes thus provides stimulating prospects for future research on self-talk underlying mechanism and to gain an in-depth understanding of self-talk phenomenon