Through empirical studies or laboratory tests, previous studies have shown that sport-confidence, attention, and emotion regulation are key factors in archery performance. The present study aims to further identify the effects and pathways of sport-confidence, attention, and cognitive reappraisal on real-world archery performance by constructing a hypothesized model to provide a basis for scientific training of athletes to improve sport performance. A survey design was utilized on a sample of 61 athletes from the Chinese National Archery Team to test the (...) model. The measurement and hypothesized models were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results indicate that the model fit well and explained 33.6% of the variance in archery performance. Sport-confidence and attention were important predictive indicators of archery performance, while the relationship between cognitive reappraisal and archery performance showed considerable complexity. We conclude that the development of sport-confidence and attention of archery athletes should be strengthened, but athletes who use cognitive reappraisal in archery competition should be mindful of its potential appropriation of cognitive resources and should be directed to improve sport-confidence or develop a positive orientation to arouse excitement. (shrink)

It is not only difficult to be a sports expert but also difficult to grow from a sports expert to a sports elite. Professional athletes are often concerned about the differences between an expert and an elite and how to eventually become an elite athlete. To explore the differences in brain neural mechanism between experts and elites in the process of motor behavior and reveal the internal connection between motor performance and brain activity, we collected and analyzed the electroencephalography findings (...) of 14 national archers and 14 provincial archers during aiming and resting states and constructed the EEG brain network of the two archer groups based on weighted phase lag index; the graph theory was used to analyze and compare the network characteristics via local network and global network topologies. The results showed that compared with the expert archers, the elite archers had stronger functional coupling in beta1 and beta2 bands, and the difference was evident in the frontal and central regions; in terms of global characteristics of brain network topology, the average clustering coefficient and global efficiency of elite archers were significantly higher than that of expert archers, and the eigenvector centrality of expert archers was higher; for local characteristics, elite archers had higher local efficient; and the brain network characteristics of expert archers showed a strong correlation with archery performance. This suggests that compared with expert archers, elite archers showed stronger functional coupling, higher integration efficiency of global and local information, and more independent performance in the archery process. These findings reveal the differences in brain electrical network topologies between elite and expert archers in the archery preparation stage, which is expected to provide theoretical reference for further training and promotion of professional athletes. (shrink)