Article Review Summary
In 'Applied Performance Psychology' there are a lot of areas that make up this fascinating course. Opportunely, I was assigned the focus of personality and exercise. After coming up with nothing from the databases, I instead used the class book and selected the article that caught my eye. 'Psychological need satisfaction, intrinsic motivation and affective response to exercise in adolescents', by Margaret L. Schneider and Bethany M. Kwan turned out to be a gold mine in terms of how attention-grabbing, and suitable it was for this assignment. This article covers the experiment of testing 192 juveniles' feelings and motives towards exercising. In their two visits to the clinic, the psychologist used intrinsic motivation as well as the Self-Determination Theory to help develop results that give insight on how the kids were affected through out the duration of a medium and a hard exercise trial (Lox, C. , Martin Ginis, K. , & Petruzzello, S. (2014).
According to Schneider (2013), in this study, the psychologist sampled 192 healthy adolescents within the ages of 14 and 16 years old. The exercise task consisted of a 30 minute increasingly ramp-type cycling trial in order to test the limit of exercise tolerance. Positive reinforcement was also provided throughout the test for the participants. The subjects had their breath by breath gas exchange measured by a Sensor Medics metabolic system (Schneider 2013). The other vital part of this study came from a more mental aspect. The psychologist surveyed participants before, during, and after the test. The questions were designed to gather information of the adolescents' thoughts of exercising. Ranging from "How much they value exercise?", is "Exercising pleasurable?", "Are they satisfied after?", and specific topics like relatedness, autonomy, and competence (Schneider 2013). In result, the studies of the testing showed that intrinsic motivation among the subjects would be enhanced when they were performing a task in which they found to be pleasurable (Schneider 2013). Those who weren't interested in the task at hand wouldn't be motivated to be active and it showed in the performance. Simply put, those who have interest or prior motives going into something will perform well or try to get the most out of it, and those on the other hand were the opposite and didn't give a good output.
Throughout this article I managed to learn an immense amount of new knowledge, as well...
