| The current study aimed to provide deeper insight into the self-talk of skilled golfers (n = 6), as well as to compare the consistency of self-talk data generated by retrospective reports and concurrent verbalizations. Each golfer wore a microphone while verbalizing his thoughts, allowing them to be recorded, for the duration of nine holes of golf on three separate occasions, and subsequently completed a questionnaire to provide a retrospective report of his self-talk at the conclusion of each round. This descriptive study also allowed the athletes to provide their own interpretations of their self-talk in follow-up interviews, and used a novel approach to coding participants' verbalized self-talk for valence (i.e., based on intonation rather than perceived impact on performance). Participants' retrospective reports were generally inconsistent with the self-talk they verbalized, specifically with regard to the proportions of instructional, motivational, positive, and negative statements, and their verbalized self-talk was overwhelmingly neutral. In addition, two previously undiscovered categories (i.e., assessment and evaluation) emerged as being necessary to fully capture the function of self-talk as used by these golfers, and lesser percentages of pre-shot, task-focused statements were found to be associated with a decline in the participants' golf performance. |
