as effective as repeating the instructions to yourself, . After reviewing 32 studies on the topic, researchers from the University of Thessaly in Greece -- a region that knows something about sports competitions -- honed the self talk distinctions even more precisely. They suggested that self-talk can help by enhancing focus, increasing confidence, regulating effort, controlling cognitive and emotional reactions, and triggering automatic execution of the task. When tasks involved relatively fine motor demands, and new, compared with well-learned, tasks. Instructional self-talk was more effective for fine tasks than was motivational self-talk; moreover, instructional self-talk was more effective for fine tasks rather than gross tasks. Learned Predictiveness Speeds Visual Processing You've got to pass the ball and you see a player who almost always makes the goal, one who never makes the goal and one who sometimes does and sometimes doesn't. Psychological science research suggests that you will more quickly recognise the face of the consistent players whether they're good or bad, than the player who is inconsistent. A study from Bangor University in the UK, published in Psychological Science , paired faces and gains or losses. If a face was strongly linked to either winning or losing, it was recognised much more quickly than the face that wasn't strongly associated with either success or failure. Researchers concluded that this means the relative value of an outcome, whether it was positive or negative, made a far less powerful impression on our visual consciousness than our ability to learn how to