Female athletes explicitly gesture in emotional situations.

Introduction: Both appraisal emotion approaches and self-regulation theory emphasize that appraising an event as conducive or detrimental to one's current goals may trigger an affective response that can be observed nonverbally. Because there may be a female advantage in the inhibition and self-regulation of emotions, we hypothesized that female but not male athletes regulate emotions during sports through explicit nonverbal behaviors.

Methods: All nonverbal hand movement behavior of right-handed female and male tennis athletes was recorded during competitive matches.

Relative age effect inverts when looking at career performance in elite youth academy soccer.

The aim of this study was to investigate the well-known selection bias favouring players born earlier in the year commonly referred to as the Relative Age Effect (RAE). Therefore, we analysed a group of top-tier youth academy players. The players joined and left the youth academy at different stages, where the first stage was at 8 years (U9) and the last stage was at 18 years of age (U19).

The obligation to succeed when it matters the most-The influence of skill and pressure on the success in football penalty kicks.

In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of skill and pressure on the success in football penalty kicks, we analyzed 1711 penalties taken over a 15-year period in major international tournaments. We conducted a multiple correspondence analysis in order to reduce six variables that are associated with skill and pressure to two dimensions that reflect our target concepts. Then, we used these two factors as independent variables in a logistic regression and fit different models using three binary dependent variables.

English goalkeepers are not responsible for England's poor performance in penalty shootouts in the past.

Scrutinizing public opinion is one of the central goals of science as the divergence between public opinion and scientific evidence can have negative consequences. The present study aims to further investigate the alleged English 'penalty curse' and determine if it can be linked to the prevalent stereotype of the 'English goalkeeper problem'. We analyzed a large sample of 2379 penalty kicks that 629 different goalkeepers faced in World Cups and European Championships, as well as in the Champions and Europa League by comparing the goalkeeper success rates of different nations by fitting a generalized linear model (binomial regression) to the data.

Nonverbal pre-performance expressions of professional darts players distinguish between good and poor performance.

The present research attempted to extend prior research that showed that thin-slices of pre-performance nonverbal behavior (NVB) of professional darts players gives valid information to observers about subsequent performance tendencies. Specifically, we investigated what kind of nonverbal cues were associated with success and informed thin-slice ratings. Participants (N = 61) were first asked to estimate the performance of a random sample of videos showing the preparatory NVB of professional darts players (N = 47) either performing well (470 clips) or poorly (470 clips).