A recent article in the Los Angeles Times sheds light on the prevalence of coaches who bully their athletes. In fact, a UK study (highlighted in that article) found that up to 75% of the 6000 athletes they interviewed (that’s 4,500 people!) had suffered some sort of emotional harm via their coach at least once. 75% is a significant number, and regardless of whether you’re a parent, athlete, or spectator, it’s probably something you’ve seen before. It may be difficult to think of a coach as anything other than a mentor, but being a bully isn’t simply defined by age or playgrounds. A bully is anyone who has perceived power over another individual. Obviously, there is a natural hierarchy of leadership in a coach-team relationship, but that doesn’t mean that yelling, name-calling, or insulting behavior is acceptable either. In the article, Karen Kaplan writes that there a...

In a USA Today article, Stressors Trigger a Nation of Yellers, discussing the impact of yelling on both the yeller and the receiver highlights an important message within our athletic world: Yelling is not only ineffective, but it is often harmful. The article discusses why we are a nation of yellers, stemming most frequently from a response to stressors and feelings of impatience and a desire to be heard. However, the article points out the scary effects yelling can have on a teenager’s brain chemistry. Teenagers interpret yelling through their amygdala, a part of their brain used to produce emotional and physical reactions to stress, whereas adults are able to process yelling through their pre-frontal cortex (the planning center of the brain). This key difference of where we interpret yelling helps explain why teenagers have a stronger negative reaction to yelling ...

This blog post is Part 3 of a 4-part blog series featuring the work of University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock. In the previous two blog posts featuring the Sian Beilock interview on the website Brain Science Podcast, we’ve been talking about what choking is and the science behind the phenomena. At the University of Chicago’s Human Performance Lab, psychologist Sian Beilock, Ph.D., has studied how people can avoid choking and perform to their best ability in stressful situations. These tips work on your favorite playing field and in the boardroom at work. To perform well, our working memory needs to be func...