All in the mind

Dr Rees was interviewed by host Claudia Hammond on the topic of ‘Sport and one man’s win is another’s despair’. How we bounce back from defeat is a matter of huge psychological debate. Dr Rees has co-authored a recent paper examining the influence of different feedback on improving performance. The research (in which the participants played darts, blindfolded) found that when positive feedback to failure put the emphasis on change being within your control, there was significant improvement in performance.

On his research Dr Rees said “More specifically, we have been interested in the attributions (explanations or reasons) people give for the causes of failure, and how these attributions affect future behaviour. Having conducted a number of field studies, we used a more controlled experimental environment to examine how attributional feedback about failure would affect participants’ self-efficacy (confidence) and performance. Results differed dependent upon whether participants had experienced just one failure, or multiple failures. We focused on two aspects: the degree to which we see causes as within our control or outside our control and the degree to which we see causes as likely to change or unlikely to change. The key message is that after repeated failure, even though there are still opportunities to improve, participants only do so when they are given the combined feedback that failure is both within their control and likely to change.”

You can listen to the full programme on the BBC Radio 4 website.