Department of Applied Physiology & Kinesiology

Dr. Janelle

Christopher Janelle, Ph.D.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
B.A.: Miami University, 1991
M.S.: Springfield College, 1993
Ph.D.: University of Florida, 1997

OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH IN THE PERFORMANCE PSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY
Director: Christopher M. Janelle, Ph.D.

The mission of the Performance Psychology Laboratory is to understand how emotion influences the thoughts and behaviors of participants in motor performance and exercise/health settings. Topics include basic understanding of emotion and movement as related to motor expertise in performance domains, as well as the role of attentional biases in the perpetuation of anxiety and movement disorders. Though uniquely applied to the performance and health/exercise domains respectively, each of the two principal arms of our research program inform each other and are congruent in their theoretical roots and practical implications.

Emotion and Performance
Close scrutiny of the extant literature on motor expertise reveals that little attention has been directed toward understanding the influence of emotion on attentional processing, specifically with regard to the mechanisms underlying visual selective attention, automaticity, and self-regulation. For the past several years, my students, colleagues, and I have examined the visual search patterns of performers in various competitive situations. Our multimethod approach has contributed novel understanding of how process oriented behavioral and psychophysiological indices [heart rate, cortical activation levels, electrodermal activity, eye movements, EMG, force parameters, etc.] permit an expert advantage among accomplished athletes, drivers, and military marksmen, to name a few. A primary mission is to determine how emotional reactivity influences attentional capabilities and eventual performance. Our findings reliably indicate that visual search strategies are significantly different when under stressful conditions as compared to relatively benign conditions. These changes in search strategy appear to be related to the narrowing of the visual attentional field that occurs when anxious, resulting in inefficient search patterns and a tendency to be distracted by irrelevant environmental cues. Though the same trends are noticed among relative experts, they are not as pronounced. Experts are more capable of dealing with stress than are novices, allowing them to maintain or improve their performance in stressful situations. Our research in the area of performance expertise has been paralleled and integrated with a current line of inquiry focused on the specific process oriented behavioral manifestations of emotional input on basic movement parameters. We have demonstrated clear behavioral effects of emotion on numerous indices of movement quality, including response time and accuracy, as well as force production and EMG components. This work has led to a better understanding of the stress - performance relationship by evaluating the mechanisms that underlie the efficiency and effectiveness of performance under stress. Likewise, our findings have provided greater insight concerning what experts do to maintain a quiet state of focused attention, yielding automated and effective performance.

Emotion and Health
In addition to the performance research with which we have been involved, the other primary arm of our research has concerned understanding the role of attention and its interaction with emotion in the health and exercise domain. A specific interest has been determining how emotion, attention, and automaticity interact in a potentially harmful manner as pertaining to emotional problems such as anxiety and body image dissatisfaction. The principal initiative is to understand how emotional responses elicited while viewing various environmental stimuli lead to the formation and maintenance of maladaptive emotional states. Our findings exhibit a high degree of conceptual similarity to the expertise work with which we have been involved. As described, elite performers perform with a high level of automated adaptability and exceptional attunement to relevant sport-specific cues in their respective sports. They are also resistant to dramatic emotional changes as related to how incoming information is processed. In a similar manner, individuals with body image problems, for example, become experts at attending to and interpreting environmental information, but do so in a self-deprecating, dysfunctional manner. Preliminary studies have revealed an attentional bias characterized by the dominant finding that individuals with body image disturbance reliably differ from others in visual search patterns to specific body locations. These types of biases are also being evaluated with respect to anxiety problems. Future investigations in which emotion and exercise paradigms are used to examine affective reactivity among individuals with body image disturbance and high levels of anxiety are currently being planned in addition to current projects funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the American Heart Association.

I optimistically and sincerely believe that our continued examination of emotional influences on behavioral processes will allow the advancement of practical recommendations to maintain a positive, productive, and efficient performance state. Likewise, by creating a more comprehensive account of the underlying interactions between the environmental cues and attentional allocation tendencies that perpetuate and precipitate emotional problems, the development of interventions to alleviate these problems can be further specified and evaluated. Indeed, the pursuit of related yet different questions in performance and health domains is challenging, yet I feel that a degree of diversification is advantageous as it enables us to pursue a general area of research while protecting against stagnation in specific paradigms and methodologies. In addition, I strongly feel that maintaining multiple related interests will enable the development of logical, comprehensive yet united theory of emotion and behavior that is enriched through the multiple perspectives from which it emerges.

Performance Psychology Laboratory

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
Singer, R.N., Hausenblas, H.A., & Janelle, C.M. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of sport psychology. New York: Wiley.

SELECTED BOOK CHAPTERS

Coombes, S. A., Gamble, K.M., Cauraugh, J. M., & Janelle, C. M. (in press). Emotional states alter force control during a feedback occluded motor task. Emotion.

Janelle, C. M., Hausenblas, H. A., Gardner, R. E., Duley, A. R., & Coombes, S. A. (in press). The perpetuation of body dissatisfaction: Attentional and affective considerations. Psychology and Health.

Janelle, C.M., & Hatfield, B. (in press). Visual attention and brain processes that underlie expert performance: Implications for sport and military psychology. Military Psychology, 19.

Bolgar, M., Giacobbi, P., & Janelle, C.M. (in press). Trait anger, appraisal, and coping differences among adolescent tennis players. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology.

Coombes, S. A., Cauraugh, J. M., & Janelle, C. M. (2007). Dissociating motivational direction and affective valence: Discrete emotions alter central motor processes. Psychological Science.

Coombes, S. A., Cauraugh, J. M., & Janelle, C. M. (2007). Emotion and initiating cue alter central and peripheral motor processes. Emotion.

Caserta, R.J., Young, J., & Janelle, C.M. (2007). Old dogs, new tricks: Training the perceptual skills of senior tennis players. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.

Mann, D., Ward, P., Williams, A.M., & Janelle, C.M. (2007). Perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport: A meta-analysis. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.

Murray, N. P., & Janelle, C.M. (2007). Event-related potential evidence for the processing efficiency theory. Journal of Sports Sciences, 25, 161-171.

Duley, A.R., Coombes, S.A., Hillman, C.H., & Janelle, C.M. (2007). Sensorimotor gating and anxiety: Prepulse inhibition following acute exercise. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 64, 157-164.

Edmonds, W.A., Mann, D.T.Y., Tennenbaum, G., & Janelle, C.M. (2006). Analysis of affect related performance zones: An idiographic approach using psychophysiological and introspective data. The Sport Psychologist, 20, 40-57.

Coombes, S.A., Cauraugh, J.H., & Janelle, C.M. (2006). Emotion and movement: Activation of defensive circuitry alters the magnitude and of a sustained muscle contraction. Neuroscience Letters, 396, 192-196.

Kim, J., Otzell, D., Kim, W., & Janelle, C.M. (2006). Near infrared light and expectancy effects on maximal isokinetic strength performance: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 20, 378-382.

Coombes, S.J., Janelle, C.M., Duley, A.R., & Conway, T. (2005). Adults with dyslexia: Theta power changes during performance of a sequential motor task. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 56, 1-14.

Coombes, S.J., Janelle, C.M., & Duley, A.R. (2005). Emotion and motor control: Movement attributes following affective picture processing. Journal of Motor Behavior, 37, 425-436.

Duley, A.R., Conroy, D.E., Morris, K., Wiley, J., & Janelle, C.M. (2005). Fear of failure biases affective and attentional responses to lexical and pictorial stimuli. Motivation & Emotion, 29, 1-17.

Duley, A.R., Janelle, C.M., & Coombes, S.J. (2004). An open-source LabView application toolkit for phasic heart rate analysis in psychophysiological research. Behavioral Research Methods, Instrumentation, and Computers, 36, 778-783.

Buck, S. M., Hillman, C. H., Evans, E. M., & Janelle, C. M. (2004). Emotional responses to pictures of ones self in healthy college age females. Motivation and Emotion, 28, 279-295.

Hausenblas, H. A., Janelle, C. M., Ellis Gardner, R., & Focht, B. C. (2004).Viewing physique slides: Affective responses of women at high and low drive for thinness. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23, 45-60.

Williams, A.M., Janelle, C.M., & Davids, K. (2004). Constraints on the search for visual information in sport. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2, 301-318.

Janelle, C.M., Champenoy, J., Coombes, S., & Mousseau, M. (2003). Augmenting the effectiveness of observational learning through alteration of model characteristics. Journal of Sports Sciences, 21, 825-838.

Connolly, C.T., & Janelle, C.M. (2003). Attentional strategies in rowing: Performance, perceived exertion, and gender considerations. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 15, 197-214.

Deeny, S., Hillman, C., Janelle, C.M., & Hatfield, B.D. (2003). Cortico-cortical communication and superior performance in skilled marksmen: An EEG coherence analysis. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 25, 188-204.

Murray, N.M., & Janelle, C.M. (2003). Anxiety and performance: A visual search examination of the processing efficiency theory. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 25, 171-187.

Janelle, C.M., Hausenblas, H.A., Fallon, E.A., & Ellis Gardner, R. (2003). A visual search examination of attentional biases among individuals with high and low drive for thinness. Eating and Weight Disorders, 8, 138-144.

Hausenblas, H.A., Janelle, C.M., Gardner, R.E., & Hagan, A.L. (2003). Affective responses of high and low body satisfied males to viewing physique slides. Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention, 11, 101-113.

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