Effects of video, priming, and music on motivation and self-efficacy in American football players

Abstract

Highlight videos accompanied by inspiring music can help in enhancing an athlete’s motivational state and self-efficacy (SE). The addition of verbal priming techniques could provide a further boost, but this combination of audiovisual stimuli has yet to be examined in a sport context. A repeated-measures, crossover design was used. The study entailed a pretraining intervention administered to American football players ( N = 32). Measures included the Situational Motivation Scale and an SE scale. Participants were exposed to control, music, video, video-music, video-priming, and video-music-priming conditions. Repeated-measures MANOVA indicated that the video-music condition elicited the strongest response in terms of increasing intrinsic forms of motivation ( p = .010) and decreasing amotivation ( p = .019). Three of eight SE components (Perceptions of Effort, Consistency, and Concentration), and an overall global SE score were significantly enhanced by the experimental stimuli, with video-music-priming eliciting the most positive response, followed by video-music. The present findings indicate the utility of audiovisual interventions combined with verbal primes immediately prior to sporting performance. Practitioners working with athletes might consider the preperformance use of motivational music and videos along with embedded subliminal verbal primes.