General and differentiation trends in subjective perception of sports activities by teenagers engaged in martial arts

Statement of the problem. Despite the fact that sport is an area of personal self-realization, development of vital psychological characteristics and socialization of the younger generation, the problem of perception of involvement in sports activities by an individual is a promising rather than developed area of psychological analysis. The purpose of the article is to present the results of a study of general and differentiating tendencies in subjective perception of sports activities by adolescents involved in martial arts. The following were considered: emotional significance of various aspects of involvement in activities, emotional stress associated with them, subjective reflection of the potential for the effectiveness of involvement in activities. Methodology (materials and methods). The methodological basis of the study is a system-personal approach. Empirical methods: «Color test of relationships»; scale questionnaire of causal attribution in sports activities. A modified version of the questionnaire «Multidimensional assessment of children’s anxiety». Respondents: 133 Krasnoyarsk schoolchildren aged 10–14 involved in martial arts, 104 males and 29 females. Data processing: determination of mean values and standard deviations, cluster analysis, identification of significant differences, analysis of variance. Research results. The general trends revealed a hierarchy of emotional significance from the greatest to the least: “I” – values and experiences associated with success – relationships and subjects of current relationships – attributes of sports – experiences associated with failure. Anxiety, moderate in the general trend, is least expressed in relationships, and most expressed in assessment situations. Causal attribution is optimistic. Differentiation trends were determined at two levels. The first is associated with differentiation of anxiety levels into relatively high and low, the significance of competitions and success, and the expression of optimism in the causal analysis. The second level is characterized by differences in anxiety levels by proximity to extreme or median values, the significance of values and attributes of sports activities, the expression of the internal locus, stability, and uniqueness of causes in the causal analysis. The unexpected nature of the data on the conjugacy of the internal locus of causal explanations with their low uniqueness is especially noted. Conclusion. The results of the study provide an idea of the internal picture of adolescents’ vision of the characteristics of their involvement in sports activities and can be useful in understanding the subjective correlates of personality activity in general.