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Elite gamers share mental toughness with top athletes, study finds:
A new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, indicated an overlap between the mental toughness and stress-coping processes in traditional sports and competitive esports athletes.
- Competitive esports athletes appear to cope with stressors similarly to high-performing sports athletes
- esports players with higher ranks tended to have higher levels of mental toughness
- sports psychology interventions for high-performing sports athletes may also be beneficial to competitive esports athletes.
QUT esports researcher Dylan Poulus said 316 esports players aged 18 and over were studied from among the top 40 per cent of players.
"A disposition considered to be influential in sporting success is mental toughness and it appears to be important for success in esports," Mr Poulus said.
"To be a millionaire esports gamer you deal with stress similar as if you are getting ready to go to the Olympics.
"It is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, and with the coronavirus pandemic there has been huge interest."
Journal Reference:
Poulus, Dylan, Coulter, Tristan J., Trotter, Michael G., et al. Stress and Coping in Esports and the Influence of Mental Toughness, Frontiers in Psychology (DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00628)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Saturday June 13 2020, @10:25PM (3 children)
They can do the concentration required during the game. But look at what a pro athlete does non-game, and what a gamer does, yeah.
Somehow holding your pee in while finishing that bag of cheetos doesn't compare to spending months on shaving 0.10 second off your 40 yard dash.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday June 14 2020, @12:38AM (2 children)
Most people assume exercising physical muscles is tougher than exercising mental muscles. I really doubt that's true. There's a reason people doing physical labor can put in eight hour workdays and knowledge workers can only meaningfully work 3-4 hours, with the rest wasted on coffee breaks and faff. Mental work is insanely hard, and a few hours is enough to exhaust you for the day. Yet we somehow consider the physical athlete exercising physical muscles as putting in more work than the mental athlete reading, thinking, and strategizing. Humans are still very much monkeys; if we don't see it (moving and sweating vs sitting at a desk), we assume it doesn't exist.
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(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @01:26AM (1 child)
We don't even know if there are "mental muscles" and whether "flexing" them does any good. Research into those mental exercising games has only shown that the only thing it improves is the ability to play mental exercising games.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:54PM
Right. And if your "mental exercising game" is doing theoretical physics, or programming software, or playing Starcraft, then you will improve your ability to do that.
Just like playing lots of football, or digging holes, or chopping wood will improve your ability to do those.
And it's pretty clear that, just like physical muscle developed doing one thing can be useful doing other things, the "mental muscle" developed doing one thing can be useful doing other things.
Obviously the metaphor breaks down if you push it too far. We haven't really developed reliably effective "exercise regimes" to develop any particular "mental muscle" we might want to, or even established that well-defined "muscles" actually exist. But that doesn't detract from the obvious fact that we have developed effective training regimes for a wide range of mental skills - that's kind of the point of education.