Two scientists were at the beginning of European sport psychology: Angelo Mosso and Philippe Tissie. Angelo Mosso was an Italian who studied the human body. He was also interested in using science to study physical education, exercise, and sport. In his experiments, Mosso found that mental work causes weakness of the muscles. He also found that physical work causes weakness in mental performance. In 1894, Mosso conducted an experiment with his brother, Ugolino Mosso. He had ten Italian Mountain soldiers climb to the top of the mountain and live in a hut for ten days. He also had them perform physical exercises. There are two parts of his results that are related to sports psychology. The first one is called the pioneer effect. The pioneer effect is when in mountain climbing, the person who is leading the group will be more tired than all the others. The second is called the rivaling effect. The rivaling effect is when the soldiers, especially in periods of boredom, would begin to compete with each other in their weight lifting tests. Philippe Tissie viewed sports as a way to treat mental disorders. He published several articles between 1894 and 1909. These articles talked about how sports could help people with mental disorders. He thought that a combination of sports, gymnastics, and psychology could help people with mental disorders. He also thought that playing in too many sports could cause people to have mental disorders and behavioral problems.
In 1896, a French doctor named Charles du Pasquier published an article about how sports could help people with depression. In 1900, Eduard Bertz said that sports could help people maintain a healthy body and soul or mind. Later in 1913, Toby Cohn believed sports was a way for people to develop self-confidence, emotional health, and goal orientation. In 1914, Bernhard Berliner conducted the first study on what effect sports and exercise had on the mind and psychology. In his study, he looked at children who exercised and played sports while at a camp. His study found that children who played sports and exercised were able to concentrate better.
The first sports psychology laboratory was opened in 1920 in Berlin, Germany by Carl Diem. That same year, a psychological lab was opened by Robert Werner Schulte at the Deutsche Hochschue fur Leibesubungen near Berlin. This was a college for physical education. The lab was used to study the natural ability that people had for doing good in sports. Schulte also included sports psychology in his talks to students who took physical education. Then in 1921, he published his first book. This book was named Body and Mind in Sport. He then continued to go on to write many books about the topic of sport psychology. One of these books was called Aptitude and Performance Testing in Sport. The next development, in 1926, was the first psychoanalysis of what motivated people to want to play sports. This was done by Helene Deutsch. She found that playing in sports could help people with depression, anxiety and overcoming fears.
There were also major developments to the field of sports psychology that took place in Russia. In 1925, Russian sports psychologist Petr Antonovic Rudik did research on the development of skills and on reaction times. A reaction time is how quickly someone responds to something. In 1926, Alexander Netchayev did research on how perception, memory, imagination, and attention are influenced by sports and physical activities.
Sports psychology in North America began in the 1890s. E. W. Scripture began to study the reaction times of runners in his Yale lab. He also watched how athletes could be helped by experimental psychology. Experimental psychology uses experiments and science to study the brain and the mind. He also wrote papers about how sports affected who a person was. In his papers he argued that prisoners who participated in sports while in jail got a better attitude.
George Wells Fitz was also active in sports psychology at this time. Fitz created the first known physical education lab in North America. In 1895, Fitz ran an experiment. This experiment focused on studying the reaction times of people. He found one thing in his results: people who had quicker and more accurate reaction times would be better at sports. Fitz was the first to run experiments on reaction times in North America.
The next major event in sports psychology was an idea known as transfer of training. Transfer of training happens when you exercise one arm or one side of the body to make it stronger and the other side also becomes stronger without having any exercise. This area was first studied by Walter Wells Davis in the late 1800s. Davis ran an experiment that involved having people lift weights with one arm and not the other. His results proved the theory of transfer of training. William G. Anderson also studied this concept. In his experiments he found that people who squeezed an object on one side of the body also got stronger on the opposite side of the body.
The next developments came from Norman Tripplett. Norman Tripplett worked at the University of Indiana as a psychologist. He conducted an experiment that focused on competition. This experiment started to connect sports and psychology. His experiment also began to combine them into one field. In 1897, Tripplett started his study. He focused on how the performance of one person is influenced by other people being around. In 1898, he wrote about his results in his article, “The Dynamogenic Factors Involved in Pace-making and Competition”. His beliefs and findings were that cyclists were more likely to cycle faster when in the presence of a pacemaker or a competitor. People were more likely to cycle faster because the presence of another person caused them to put in more effort and use energy that they were not before. In 1898, Tripplett tried to confirm his predictions and beliefs he came up with during the cycling study by running an experiment in laboratory. This experiment consisted of people winding fishing line as fast as they could in order to move a flag around a course. The results of this experiment confirmed the results and predictions that were found in the cycling study.
In 1903, G.T.W Patrick studied the psychology of American football and why people loved the game so much. Next in 1912, Howard wanted to discover why people became so emotional while watching sports. Then in 1915, Karl S. Lashley and John B. Watson started a study that focused on the learning curve of people in sports. A learning curve is how people learn the skills they need to in order to succeed in sports. The sport that they focused their study on was archery. The results of their study lead them to argue that when people were participating in harder tasks, like archery, they were more likely to work harder to complete the task.