Sport psychology in emerging countries, special section 2: Introduction

Abstract

This is the 2nd special issue section focused on sport and exercise psychology research and practice in countries referred to as “emerging” in sport and exercise psychology. Promotion of sport psychology research and practice in emerging countries is an important aim in this journal and of the International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP). This special issue is one among several actions adopted by the ISSP to promote sport psychology in emerging countries. Six articles are reported here from China, Ghana, Argentina and Brazil. Some of them focus on sport psychology practice while others cover different areas of sport and exercise psychology research. These contributions extend beyond building capacity in these regions to an equal mandate: revealing diverse sport psychology practices from the global sport psychology community.

Keywords:

• Emerging
• sport psychology
• cultural
• society
• international
• journal

When we decided to develop the Special Issue (SI) “Sport Psychology in Emerging Countries” (Schinke, Papaioannou, & Schack, 2016) we did not expect authors’ enthusiasm, as reflected in an exceedingly large number of manuscript submissions. Each submission underwent the typical review process, whereby some were accepted and some rejected. Still the number of total accepted articles was too large for a single SI. Consequently, the co-editors decided to provide two successive Special Sections with the same SI focus. In this 2nd instalment, most of the articles were accepted two years ago, and until now, they were found in the “latest article” section of the website of the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (IJSEP).

The definition of “emerging countries” and the scientific and editorial reasons that led us to develop this SI appear in the introduction of Part One (Schinke et al., 2016). Adding to the previous justification, readers of the IJSEP should understand that the emphasis of this journal is to promote sport and exercise psychology through diverse perspectives from across the world; which is also the main aim of the International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP), this journal’s sponsor. To accomplish this aim we decided to encourage scholars from emerging countries to publish their sport psychology research in this journal through an open call. We anticipate that this strategy will boost their research and maybe their status as emerging scholars, internationally.

Beyond this SI, we plan to initiate further actions to promote SEP in emerging countries. Since the publication of Section 1 in 2016, we also created a position for a new Section Editor focused on SEP in emerging countries. The new Section Editor is Professor Natalia Stambulova from Halmstad University, Sweden. Dr Stambulova combines extensive editorial experience in several of our field’s leading journals with international experiences in SEP research and practice, where she has supported a diversity of young and established international scholars. Authors from emerging countries contact Dr Stambulova for advice regarding the publication of their research.

These actions are part of a wider ISSP Mission to promote sport and exercise psychology in emerging countries. Layered into this broad-based mission, the ISSP Managing Council often organises its annual meetings in emerging countries to support local hosts in the organisation of national and / or regional conferences. Globally, in 2009, the World Congress of Sport Psychology took place in Marrakesh, Morocco, attracting more than one thousand sport psychologists from all over the world to an emerging country. More recently, the ISSP has also initiated an Ambassador’s Programme, where national sport psychology societies apply for an expert in research or practice to travel and deliver workshops at their annual event. Recently in November 2018, one ISSP representative, ISSP Vice President Dr Tatiana Ryba was in attendance at the launch of the Ghana Society of Sport Psychology and delivered educational presentations.

The policies of the IJSEP and the ISSP promote intercultural understanding and peace. However, since the publication of Section One of this SI, new political developments have transpired, creating an impression that the world is becoming more conservative towards intercultural exchanges, while the hope for global peace might appear to be fading. The IJSEP is not a journal in the position to analyse politico-economic issues. However, it is a high-quality peer-review outlet that promotes understanding about how people from different cultures think, feel and behave in sport and exercise contexts. Beyond cultural differences, the content of this journal, such as the following article by Ge et al. (2019), illustrates that basic human needs, such as the need for autonomy, are universal and their satisfaction should be accomplished if we want to promote human flourishing and human good in our global village (Ryan & Deci, 2017). This information should be transmitted not only to sport psychologists but also to coaches and athletes. We must educate and enable athletes to act as role models and messengers of cultural understanding and peace.

The contributions

The current Section starts with an article stemming from the research tradition of cultural sport psychology (e.g. Ryba & Schinke, 2009). Ge et al. (2019) present some of the current challenges of Chinese Olympic athletes within the Chinese Whole-Nation system and the implications for Chinese sport psychologists. Unlike Western and other capitalist societies, the Chinese government has sole responsibility for sport, including regulation of all sport administration and payment of all salaries from athletes and coaches to sport scientists and administrators. This system provides the resources to Chinese athletes to devote themselves entirely to their sport training. On the other hand, the Chinese Whole national System’s medal orientation puts substantial psychological pressure on athletes to perform, while the increased demands restrict athletes’ opportunities for proper formal education and development of skills to survive after sport retirement. While Chinese sport psychologists are experienced in the provision of culture-specific relaxation and self-control techniques to help athletes cope with pressure, career transition services is an emerging topic for Chinese sport psychologists, much like in other countries. Although both of these challenges can be found in competitive sport across most countries, the authors of this article unveil some interesting culture-related aspects of Chinese sport that differentiate the work of Chinese sport psychologists from the work of their colleagues in other countries. An example is the high level of control of coaches on athletes, which is not found in several contemporary Western societies. Still, according to self-determination theory and research (Ryan & Deci 2017), the need for autonomy is universal and Chinese athletes also need autonomy-supportive environments to flourish. As Chinese athletes are moving towards elite sport the power struggle intensifies between athletes and coaches in terms of who has control in decision-making. Chinese sport psychologists are faced with the herculean task to change the mindset of millions of Chinese coaches, many of them perceiving their athletes’ quests for autonomy as rebellion and indication of laziness.

Hagan and Schack (2019) focused on sport psychology practice in Western sub-Saharan Africa. Their arguments concur with claims that several research findings in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) might have little relevance to African sport psychologists, who serve athletes believing in witchcraft. Many Western sub-Saharan athletes adopt Pre-Game Rituals (PGRs) called juju, which are spiritual practices unknown to WEIRD societies. Hagan and Schack (2019) suggest that these PGRs might act as a psychological placebo affecting athletic performance. Then, they identify some PGRs that might be used as Pre-Performance Routines (PPR) without compromising athletes’ health and well-being. Research is needed to verify their claims, and their contribution is intended as a catalyst.

South America is a large continent with little presence in English-speaking journals of sport psychology (Papaioannou, Machaira, & Theano, 2013). Hence, we are pleased to include in this issue four articles from this continent. The article from Raimundi, Molina, Schmidt and Hernandez-Mendo (2019) comes from Argentina. It focused on family functioning and its association with athletes’ character strengths, an issue that is under examined in sport psychology literature. As was expected, in families with positive functioning athletes scored higher on character strengths such as perseverance, hope, zest, teamwork and kindness than in families with negative functioning. Moreover, elite-level athletes scored higher on perseverance and teamwork than recreational athletes. Interestingly, these authors found that elite athletes were more likely to perceive positive family functioning than recreational athletes. These findings call for further studies investigating the causal relationship of these variables and the deeper investigation of third variables, such as social class/family wealth, that might affect some of the aforementioned associations.

The remaining three articles are from sport psychologists in Brazil. Parma, Costa, Andrade, Cavalcante, Hackfort, and Noce (2019) focused on decision-making and personality of wheelchair athletes, revealing that worse decision-making scores corresponded positively to irresponsibility, psychoticism and anxiety. Machado et al. (2019) adapted the serve-specific core self-evaluations scale in Portuguese and their findings provide preliminary support to the construct validity of this scale. Fortes et al. (2019) investigated the effects of body weight reduction methods on symptoms of stress and psychophysiological recovery of judokas who reduced 10% of their weight within a 2-week period. Their findings imply that these rapid body weight reduction methods increased the magnitude of stress symptoms and decreased perceptions of psychophysiological recovery in judokas.

These contributions provide the readers the unique challenges for practitioners and the context-specific characteristics of sport psychology practices in specific places in the world, as well as the expansion of well-developed theories and methods to countries that do not perfectly identify themselves with the WEIRD acronym. We are grateful to all authors of this SI and we wish all of them to become witnesses of a big boost in sport and exercise psychology in their locations in the near future.