Psychiatric and neuropsychological issues in sports medicine.

This article reviews psychiatric/psychological issues in the athletic training room, including recognition of these issues and a framework for management. Because the majority of research has been conducted in college settings, most of the issues discussed are presented in the context of college sports, although the results generalize to other athletic arenas. Greater awareness of psychological issues, empirical research, and education about mental health issues in the sports medicine community are clearly needed.

Probability matching: encouraging optimal responding in humans.

Two hundred undergraduate students participated in a repeated-trials binary choice procedure in which choice of one outcome was correct on 75% of trials. Subjects received 192 trials and were divided into five conditions: (1) control; (2) subjects were given the actual probabilities; (3) subjects were told if they did well they could leave early; (4) competition condition; (5) midway through the task subjects were asked to recommend a strategy for another subject. Half of the subjects in each group were told that the best they could do was to be correct on 75% of the trials. This manipulation permitted assessment of the hypothesis that subjects in probability-matching tasks are seeking a strategy that will be correct on 100% of the trials. The results partially confirmed this hypothesis. In addition, two of the variables improved performance significantly (giving probabilities and asking subjects to recommend a strategy). However, while subjects in all groups improved significantly over trials, optimal choice did not occur in this task.