Journal of Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine. Journal of Orthopedics and Sports Medicine 4 : DOI: Mindfulness training has gained popularity in the scientific field, and has been proposed as an efficient psychotherapy for affective disorders. Uncertainty un-expectancy plays a critical role in inducing stressful emotions during sport games, and mindfulness training is especially useful in calming the body peacefully for the athletes.
In this paper, we will review experimental studies and propose theoretic speculations concerning uncertainty and emotional arousal during sport games. We first analyzed the effects of emotions on sports according to two dimensions arousal and valence , next we analyzed the effects according to our previous three-primary-color emotional theory, which suggested that there are three prototypical emotions Joy, Fear and Disgust. Furthermore, we proposed that emotional arousal activates the sympathetic and norepinephrine system, while mindfulness activates the para-sympathetic and dopamine system.
Therefore, mindfulness will activate the neural systems that are totally different from or contrary the emotional arousal systems to induce peaceful mind. This review will contribute greatly to theoretical and empirical explorations of emotional regulations with mindfulness during sports.
In the field of sport psychology, the predominating explanation for the influence of anxiety on sport performance has been the Inverted-U hypothesis, which is originally intended to describe the effects of emotional arousal on sport performance [2]. Even though this theory is essentially true, problems are arising in that it did not pay attention to the individual difference.
Thus alternative theory, referred as individual zones of optimal functioning theory, suggested that each athlete has different expectation about the situation, thus possesses different range of emotional anxiety at the same situation [3].
