DR OLIVIA HURLEY, PSYCHOLOGY AND SPORT PSYCHOLOGY LECTURER AT THE DÚN LAOGHAIRE INSTITUTE OF ART, DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY
“Ihave a very strong background in sport,” says Dr Hurley. “I competed at an elite level of track and field as a sprinter and when I was competing I became interested in psychology too. I got my first psychology book when I was about 14, and I loved it. I attended University College Dublin (UCD), where my research was supervised by top sport psychologist, Professor Aidan Moran. Today I am a Lecturer on the BSc Applied Psychology programme in IADT (in Sport and Health Psychology).
“Sport psychology was a very maledominated area back when I was studying in UCD but I remember telling Professor Moran that I would like to be the female version of him in about 10 years, and he has helped me to become that.”
Dr Hurley did her PhD on the psychological responses of elite athletes to injuries. This also looked at how much athletes are invested in their sport and how much they identify themselves primarily as athletes.
“When athletes can’t do what they love due to their injuries, their sense of identity becomes a bit shaken and they sometimes have of a tough time dealing with their injuries. Statistics vary, but from research studies we know that anything from about 10-20pc of athletes who are injured are not only ‘down’ over it, they may be clinically depressed. It also means that 80-85pc of them cope quite well, but there’s always that one or two in 10 that maybe don’t cope so well.”
Through Professor Moran, Dr Hurley got some great lecturing opportunities before becoming a full-time lecturer at IADT. She was encouraged by Dr Andrew Power, now IADT’s Registrar, to set up the Certificate in Sport Psychology, which has now been running for about eight years.
“IADT set up the first ever Masters in Cyberpsychology globally too. About four years ago, we had the opportunity to write a number of books and chapters on this new area of psychology and I was asked to contribute to some of them. For me, this involved looking at how technology has influenced athletes’ lives specifically.
“In 2016, a team of my colleagues published a book about cyberpsychology in which I wrote a chapter on sport and health cyberpsychology. I realised when writing it that there was very little research being done in this area. Technology has become such a big part of sport, from how we monitor players, to assessing their performances. When I searched the term ‘sport cyberpsychology’ online after writing the chapter for our book, the first thing that was coming up was my book chapter.”
Last summer, Dr Hurley approached Routledge and asked if they would be interested in her writing a whole book on sport cyberpsychology, and they enthusiastically agreed to support her. ‘Sport Cyberpsychology’ will be published in early 2018 and is the first book devoted to the examination of the influence of technology on human interaction, behaviour and mental health in a sporting context.
The book is a culmination of research done in this area to date. It examines contemporary issues such as cyberbullying and online harassment of athletes. It also examines gaming and virtual reality use in athletes’ training and injury recovery regimes; the role of GPS; the use of social media by athletes and sports organisations; the psychology of athletes’ self-presentation and brand management, and issues of online privacy. The book addresses issues such as athletes’ mental health in relation to their online activities. For example, its positive use for education and training purposes, as well as negative engagement by athletes online, such as excessive online gambling.
“It’s been a real passion project,” says Dr Hurley. “I would love to see more research being done in this area. Gathering athletes’ performance data is fantastic and it can tell athletes how hard they’re working, which is great. But, there’s a danger that if you have all your performance-related data published on a wall for the teammates to see, it could impact on the athletes’ performances in both a positive and negative way. There has not been enough research carried out in this context to know how best we manage this kind of scenario.”
Dr Hurley is also determined to bust some myths in relation to sport psychology.
“A lot of people don’t realise that psychologists are primarily scientists. I want to be a great advocate for women, and a positive role model for girls who would like to get involved in sport psychology. One of the things we often see in the media is that some people are described as a being ‘sport psychologist’, when in fact they’re not actually qualified as sport psychologists. They may be counsellors or have a primary degree in psychology, but they haven’t been trained specifically in sport psychology. This training involves in-depth study about the science behind it and the ethical principles the discipline.
“Some people also think psychologists tell athletes what to do and that we, in some way, control them but that’s not the case. Sport psychology is about teaching people how to understand their own behaviour and their own mental processes using evidence from research findings, so that they then have the tools to help themselves.
“The best scientists, including sports psychologists, are the ones who have the scientific evidence to support everything they are advocating, when encouraging their students and athletes to use certain strategies or techniques that may be effective in helping them to mentally prepare for their sport.”
Dr Hurley continues, “There should be scientific evidence to back everything up. And, if the evidence is not available, we either need to do more research in that area or we need to think about whether or not we should be advocating this particular technique in the first place if the evidence is not available.”