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The psychological factors of sports injuries constitute a growing field of study, even from the point of view of the prediction of their occurrence. Most of them, however, do not take into account the likelihood of the injuries' occurrence and the weight and role of the psychological variables on it. We conducted a study building up a Bayesian Network on a big sample of athletes, trying to assess these probabilistic links among several relevant psychological variables and the injuries' occurrence. The sample was constituted by 297 athletes (239 males, 58 females) from a wide range of sports: track and field; judo; fencing; karate; boxing; swimming; kayaking; artistic rollerskating, and team sports as football, basketball, and handball (Mean age: 25.10 +/- -3.87; range: 21-38 years). Several psychological variables, such as anxiety, social support, and self-efficacy were studied. Also, we recorded the history of injuries as well the body mass index and personal epidemiological data. The overall picture of the generated graph and Bayesian Network and its analysis - including the use of hypothetical data by means of several instantiations - includes the nuclear role of the Self-Efficacy regarding the injuries' occurrence likelihood; the decreasing impact of the competitive anxiety previous to the injury; the probabilistic independence of the players' risk behaviors, and the relevance of the environmental clues such the use of coping strategies and social support in order to build up a good level of Self-Efficacy after the occurrence of an injury. All these data are relevant when designing both preventive and recovery interventions from the multidisciplinary as well as from the psychological point of view., This research was supported by the Spanish MINECO (Grant PSI2011-27000); and by Murcia Regional Football Association's Football Project (Grant FFRM-UMU-04 0092 321B 64502 14704).

The purpose of this paper was to discover the relationships among 22 relevant psychological features in semi-professional football players in order to study team’s performance and collective efficacy via a Bayesian network (BN). The paper includes optimization of team’s performance and collective efficacy using intercausal reasoning pattern which constitutes a very common pattern in human reasoning. The BN is used to make inferences regarding our problem, and therefore we obtain some conclusions; among them: maximizing the team’s performance causes a decrease in collective efficacy and when team’s performance achieves the minimum value it causes an increase in moderate/high values of collective efficacy. Similarly, we may reason optimizing team collective efficacy instead. It also allows us to determine the features that have the strongest influence on performance and which on collective efficacy. From the BN two different coaching styles were differentiated taking into account the local Markov property: training leadership and autocratic leadership.

The purpose of this paper is the study of relationships between negative psychological features in young competitive team players via a Bayesian network (BN). The BN let us describe in graphical terms the dependencies and conditional independencies between variables in a multivariate context, and therefore it let us analyze the relationships between the type of motivational climate and orientation of team players (from two different frameworks: goal orientation theory, and self-determination motivation theory), and we took into account their willingness to accept the use of gamesmanship and cheating at the games, related with somatic and cognitive pre-competitive anxiety. The BN analysis includes three reasoning patterns: evidential reasoning, causal reasoning and intercausal reasoning. We built a BN from a data set composed of twelve psychological variables, which were identified as relevant to this study. The structure and parameters were learnt with TETRAD IV and the BN was implemented in Netica software.

Recently knowledge has been obtained about the Cooperative meta-dynamics in performance teams, and also on the fit between the manager’s and team member’s beliefs about teamwork and performance. To obtain this, a specific instrument has been created and validated, the Questionnaire on Cooperation in Performance Teams (CWQ). The need for such this kind of tool is double fold: first, to combine the most relevant conceptual theories in a short and friendly usable instrument, and to obtain easily applicable knowledge addressed to managers and coaches working with performance teams. In order to accomplish fully with this aim, a confirmatory analysis of the new instrument is required too. Consequently, the CWQ was administered to 218 players of performance sports teams (Mean age = 21.12; SD = 6.72; mean years of experience = 11.42; SD = 6.33). The data analysis consisted on the study of the main components (forcing and without forcing the number of factors), with a Varimax rotation. The results confirm the validation of the CWQ both for the “A” and “B” versions of the questionnaire and the existence of four meta-factors: 1. Global cooperation with the team; 2. Cooperation for personal growth in the team; 3. Emotional cooperation, and 4. Conditional cooperation. The four factors shown factorial weights similar to those obtained in the previous exploratory study. These data confirms its transcultural and transituational invariance of the CWQ, as along with its conceptual validity and the solid theoretical conception of the abovementioned factors, and also its applicability in various performance environments. In addition, a mathematical analysis has been introduced to evaluate the symmetry between cooperative work beliefs from both coach and player views, embedded in the conceptual framework of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory.

In this study, we try to discover the natural psychological dynamics in a cooperative work team. We have selected a group of individuals that can help us to explore the psychological processes when working in a team. A new tool is used which has been developed from the most relevant conceptual frameworks existing at the moment, the Cooperative Workteams Questionnaire, (CWQ). In this paper, we present the psychometric characteristics and impact encountered by the conceptual framework. We also present an analysis of the results obtained from applying this framework.

Title: A Bayesian Analysis of the motivation, motivational climate and anx- iety in young competitive team players. Abstract: The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between the self-determinated motivation, the goal orientation and the perceived moti- vational climate and their impact on the cognitive and somatic components of the competitive anxiety in young athletes, and their acceptance of the use of cheating and gamemanship in sport. We administered PMCSQ, TEOSQ, BRSQ, CDED and SAS- 2 to 270 football, handball and basket- ball players (Mean age = 14.67, SD = 1.53). Probabilistic relationships of dependence and independence of the variables were studied by a Bayesian network (BN), developed using Netica and Tetrad IV. After the validation of the BN, we instantiated hypothetical probability values of several de- pendent variables in order to analyze the variation of the probability of the independent variables. Results show different statistical dependence rela- tionships between the self-determined motivation and achievement moti- vation, respect to the competitive anxiety, and also show a controversial re- lationship between the perceived motivational climate and the task and ego orientation of the players. It also shows the residual role of the somatic anxiety, and the instrumental role of the the use of cheating and ga- memanship.

The purpose of this study was to discover the relationships among 18 psychological features in a cooperative team in order to analyse work team performance. A Bayesian network (BN) has been built from a dataset of 403 soccer semi-professional players, taking into account prototypical sportive teams with respect to other workteams, regarding its psychological features, such as leadership, cohesion or group roles. The BN shows three conditionally independent features according to the local Markov property: two cohesion dimensions and the cooperative style of management/coaching; and features such as players satisfaction, experience, social integration in the team, and the workplace specificity, i.e., the players’ positions, which were located at the bottom in the BN show a clear dependence. The BN was used to make inferences achieving: (1) The social side of the cohesion has a low likelihood influence on the performance; (2) All psychological leadership styles (positive and/or negative) have some influence on the performance, the years remaining in the same team, and the player’s position; (3) The positive leadership style is not a required condition for the performance or for the player’s satisfaction, but a consequence of the other psychological variables.