Sports psychology is a dynamically developing discipline on the intersection between psychology and sports science. It deals with human experience and action in the complex field of sport and exercise. Areas of interest include options for ways of optimizing sports performance, on the one hand, and topics relating to sport and health as well as the sociopsychological effects of sport and exercise on the other. This textbook discusses these topics primarily in relation to the empirical and experimental foundations of the field and in the context of the current state of international research. In 12 chapters, internationally renowned authors introduce the empirical and experimental foundations for the individual topics of perception and attention, motor learning and motor expertise, emotion and motivation, embodiment and social-psychological aspects of sport, and they discuss the research methods that are central to each of these subject areas.

The end-state comfort (ESC) effect is an important aspect of anticipatory be-havioral control. It reflects a persons strategy to avoid uncomfortable body positions at the end of movements. As the focus of previous studies primarily laid on young adults, there are only few studies on the ESC effect in children, which show divergent findings. By means of the systematic review (Chapter 2), possible reasons for these inconsistent findings were provided (e.g. age effects, the number of action-steps, precision requirements, or task differences). One assumption provided in the systematic review was examined in Chapter 3. This assumption implied that motor development relies on the development of cognitive control, mainly on the development of executive functions. Therefore, a test battery was designed, consisting of three motor tasks to measure ESC and three cognitive tasks to measure executive functions. Nevertheless, results were not able to approve the assumption. An important finding was that the performance in the different motor and cognitive tasks were not related to each other, suggesting an interindividually different developmental trajectory for each of them. The focus of future studies should rely on the examination of potential constraints on ESC planning, like those outlined in Chapter 2, which possibly influenced the developmental trajectories of the ESC effect in childhood and caused the inconsistent findings in the studies reviewed. Moreover, causes should be detected for the fact, that the tasks used in Chapter 3 were not related to each other. Another focus should be on the influence of other executive functions, like inhibition, on the development of ESC. ; eng

Abstract: Technological and digital progress benefits physical activity (PA) research. Here we compiled expert knowledge on how Ambulatory Assessment (AA) is utilized to advance PA research, i.e., we present results of the 2nd International CAPA Workshop 2019 "Physical Activity Assessment - State of the Science, Best Practices, Future Directions" where invited researchers with experience in PA assessment, evaluation, technology and application participated. First, we provide readers with the state of the AA science, then we give best practice recommendations on how to measure PA via AA and shed light on methodological frontiers, and we furthermore discuss future directions. AA encompasses a class of methods that allows the study of PA and its behavioral, biological and physiological correlates as they unfold in everyday life. AA includes monitoring of movement (e.g., via accelerometry), physiological function (e.g., via mobile electrocardiogram), contextual information ...

Abstract: The present study examined the developmental trajectories of motor planning and executive functioning in children. To this end, we tested 217 participants with three motor tasks, measuring anticipatory planning abilities (i.e., the bar-transport-task, the sword-rotation-task and the grasp-height-task), and three cognitive tasks, measuring executive functions (i.e., the Tower-of-Hanoi-task, the Mosaic-task, and the D2-attention-endurance-task). Children were aged between 3 and 10 years and were separated into age groups by 1-year bins, resulting in a total of eight groups of children and an additional group of adults. Results suggested (1) a positive developmental trajectory for each of the sub-tests, with better task performance as children get older; (2) that the performance in the separate tasks was not correlated across participants in the different age groups; and (3) that there was no relationship between performance in the motor tasks and in the cognitive tasks used in the present study when controlling for age. These results suggest that both, motor planning and executive functions are rather heterogeneous domains of cognitive functioning with fewer interdependencies than often suggested