Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pioneering psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making greater use of empirical research methodologies, sought to understand mental factors that affect athletic performance. Though the psychologists behind the studies described here worked independently of one another and charted their own distinct courses of inquiry, their works, taken together, provided the corpus of precedents and foundations on which the modern field of sport psychology was built. The essays collected in this volume tell the stories not only of these psychologists and their subjects but of the social and academic context that surrounded them, shaping and being shaped by their ideas.

Christopher D. Green is a professor of psychology at York University. He is the coauthor of Early Psychological Thought: Ancient Accounts of the Mind and Soul and the coeditor of The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science. Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. is a professor of psychology at Texas A&M University and the author and editor of numerous books, including A History of Psychology in Letters and A Brief History of Modern Psychology.

 

Contributors: David Baker, Frank G. Baugh, Günther Bäumler, Angela H. Becker, Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., Stephen F. Davis, Donald A. Dewsbury, Alfred H. Fuchs, Stephen T. Graef, Christopher D. Green, C. James Goodwin, Matthew T. Huss, and Alan S. Kornspan.

"Providing excellent case studies of how experimental psychology was carried out in its early years, psychologists Christopher Green and Ludy Benjamin offer a look at those who did early work on what is now known as sport psychology."—S. R. Flora, Choice