Sport self-talk: An interpretative review

Abstract

There currently exists a great deal of available evidence that shows how important self-talk is for performance and self-regulation in sport. Hence, it is not surprising that, during the past few decades, research into sport self-talk has consistently been growing. Nonetheless, the term self-talk refers to different cognitive processes, which makes the conceptual delimitation of self-talk difficult. The purpose of this interpretative review was to present the state-of-the-art in sport self-talk research in order to solve this conceptual confusion and thereby to promote research in the Spanish-speaking world. Specifically, in this review we focused on (a) the development of the major research trends in sport self-talk and, in relation to them (b) the definitions of different types of self-talk in sport, (c) self-talk assessment instruments and their relationships with other examined variables, and (d) the different types of self-talk interventions and their respective effects on sport performance.