Extreme Sports And Psychology __HOT__
Professors Brymer and Schweitzer said extreme sports were leisure activities in which a mismanaged mistake or accident could result in death, such as BASE jumping, big wave surfing and solo rope free climbing.
extreme sports and psychology
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"While participant numbers in many traditional team and individual sports such as golf, basketball and racket sports seem to have declined over the past decade, participant numbers in extreme sports have surged, making it a multi-million dollar industry."
"Our research has shown people who engage in extreme sports are anything but irresponsible risk-takers with a death wish. They are highly trained individuals with a deep knowledge of themselves, the activity and the environment who do it to have an experience that is life enhancing and life changing," he said.
"For example, BASE jumpers talk about being able to see all the colours and nooks and crannies of the rock as they zoom past at 300km/h, or extreme climbers feel like they are floating and dancing with the rock. People talk about time slowing down and merging with nature."
"Far from the traditional risk-focused assumptions, extreme sports participation facilitates more positive psychological experiences and express human values such as humility, harmony, creativity, spirituality and a vital sense of self that enriches everyday life," Professor Schweitzer said.
"So rather than a theory based approach which may make judgements that don't reflect the lived experience of extreme sports participants, we took a phenomenological approach to ensure we went in with an open mind," he said.
"By doing this we were able to, for the first time, conceptualise such experiences as potentially representing endeavours at the extreme end of human agency, that is making choices to engage in activity which may in certain circumstances lead to death.
Extreme sports, defined as sporting or adventure activities involving a high degree of risk, have boomed since the 1990s. These types of sports attract men and women who can experience a life-affirming transcendence or "flow" as they participate in dangerous activities. Extreme sports also may attract people with a genetic predisposition for risk, risk-seeking personality traits, or underlying psychiatric disorders in which impulsivity and risk taking are integral to the underlying problem. In this report, we attempt to illustrate through case histories the motivations that lead people to repeatedly risk their lives and explore psychiatry's role in extreme sports. A sports psychiatrist can help with therapeutic management, neuromodulation of any comorbid psychiatric diagnosis, and performance enhancement (eg, risk minimization) to cultivate improved judgment which could include identifying alternative safer recreational options. Because flirting with death is critical to the extreme sports ethos, practitioners must gain further understanding of this field and its at-risk participants.
The purpose of the current study was to investigate the relationship between attachment styles, emotion regulation strategies, and their possible effects on health-promoting behaviors among those who participate (N = 109) versus those who do not participate in extreme sports (N = 202). Multiple mediation analyses were conducted to test the hypotheses. Different nonadaptive emotion regulation strategies mediated the relationship between insecure attachment styles and health-promoting behaviors in two groups of the current study. In the extreme sports group, lack of awareness about emotions and lack of goals while dealing with negative emotions mediated the relationship between anxious attachment style and health-promoting behaviors; and lack of goals while dealing with negative emotions mediated the relationship between avoidant attachment style and health-promoting behaviors. In participants who do not engage in extreme sports, lack of clarity about emotions mediated the relationship between anxious attachment style and health-promoting behaviors. Findings and their implications were discussed in the light of the literature.
Farley, a former president of the American Psychological Assn., has studied extreme athletes over the course of decades, accompanying hot air balloon operators during races and journeying to Katmandu, Nepal, to interview climbers returning safely after summiting Mt. Everest.
Farley said research suggested that brain chemistry could be involved in risk-seeking behavior, but that it was probably not the foremost factor. He said that extreme athletes he interviewed shared a collection of traits: tending to be optimistic, energetic, innovative and highly self-confident, with conviction that they can control their fate.
When considering extreme environments it is easy to make assumptions about personality, which on closer examination do not stand up to scrutiny. Take, for example, one of the best-researched personality dimensions: introversion-extraversion. Extraversion as a trait appears in all established psychological models of personality, and there is considerable evidence that it has a biological basis. The concepts of introversion and extraversion long ago escaped the confines of academic psychology and are widely used in everyday conversation, albeit in ways that do not always reflect the psychological definitions.
As with extraversion, a link between the sensation-seeking trait and a preference for extreme environments makes intuitive sense. Moreover, there is empirical evidence to support it. Studies have shown, for example, that people who engage in extreme sports such as hang gliding or surfing tend to score higher on sensation-seeking than those who engage in less risky sports such as golf. That said, the relationship between sensation-seeking and extreme activities is not clear-cut.
At first sight, then, we have a paradox. A desire for sensation would predispose someone to seek out an extreme environment, but the evidence suggests that many of the people who do so are not in fact sensation-seekers. One partial explanation is that extreme activities differ in the rewards they offer. People who are high in the need for sensation may be attracted to some sorts of extreme activities but not others. Some activities, such as skydiving or BASE jumping, offer short bursts of intense sensation, whereas others, such as climbing or diving, offer sensations that are more prolonged but often less intense.
Therapist Stogsdill plans to keep pushing at this connection between adrenaline and mental health, even linking up with an Australian psychologist to advance the research. He hopes extreme sports will help restore a mental balance for more kids, just like they did for him.
At only 18 years old, Kelly Sildaru undoubtedly ranks as one of the most influential athletes in extreme sports. The freestyle skier from Estonia took home her first X Games gold medal in 2016, at age 13. Not only did the win make her the youngest gold medalist in X Games history, it also made her the first Estonian to win any medal at the famed sporting event. Sildaru won the Dew Tour in both 2015 and 2016. Then in 2017, she became the first woman to land both a Switch 1260-degree Mute and a 1440-degree during competition. That same year, Sildaru won the slope style at the World Cup, and while she approached the event as a favorite, had to skip the 2018 Winter Olympic Games due to a knee injury.
Adrenalin junkie, thrillseeker, risktaker. Put those unfounded labels aside, says Southern Cross University psychologist Dr Eric Brymer, because the true motivations of extreme sportspeople flip our perceptions.
A Need to BelongAlthough people report many reasons for following a favorite team, social connectedness is among the most frequently cited, as Wann finds in his research on college and professional sports fans.
In a series of studies, Wann has surveyed hundreds of undergraduate fans, who vary in their fanaticism for their college teams. After measuring levels of sports team identification and psychological well-being, he found that the results are correlational but consistent: Higher identification with a team is associated with significantly lower levels of alienation, loneliness, and higher levels of collective self-esteem and positive emotion.
In addition, highly identified fans tend to be socialized to sports early and view it not just as a game but also as a nostalgic or emotional experience. Many say that they can remember going to games as a child, or that games remind them of pleasant childhood memories.
In fact, marketers over the past decade have notably targeted the sports fan psyche by using relationship-building marketing strategies, says Jeff James, associate professor of sports marketing at Florida State University. Rather than exclusively trying to attract new fans, they are attempting to build longer lasting, closer relationships with existing ones.
Course coordinator for the Bachelor of Psychological Science with Honours Dr Eric Brymer has spent 30 years getting inside the minds of people who climb huge mountains, surf big waves, jump out of planes or freedive deep underwater. In this episode he chats with Education student Blake about why people participate in extreme sports and how it can make them feel more connected to nature and their own humanity.
Dr. Stephen Milstein, a Whistler psychologist, has seen his fair share of thrill seekers come through his door. He argues that extreme-sport participants like McSorley aren't in fact thrill seekers, but professionals who have made careful study of their sport and progressed to an elite level.
"I find, at least in my practice, many of the people who are thrill seekers also are dissociative," he says, adding that disassociation is a state where the person experiences numbness, either physically or emotionally. "I think a lot of the people who are thrill seekers are just trying to feel. They're flat a lot of the time and they need that extra charge to get their endorphins."It's that chemical surge that so many athletes can't seem to live without, although Milstein takes a different view on the addictive qualities of extreme sports. 041b061a72