Abstract:
Karate as a complex and demanding combat sport, represents an intense cognitive
process underlying decision-making behavior during the performance. It’s based on
psychological actions, and it’s a complex dynamic process for everyone. Any individual
players are put up with various choices of alternative actions and help to take corrective
action during the bout, it’s called as Decisions-Making. Hence, males and females have
different ways to deal with decisions during combat. After a long observation on a
karate match, it can be observed that most of the karateka did not take the correct
decisions during the match. According to that, this study was to identify the impact of
psychological intervention actions on gender in decisions making of young karateka at the
Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka. The purposive sample method was used, under
the quasi-experimental research design to select thirty Karateka (n = 30), with five to
ten years of training experience, and they were divided into gender groups (Male:15 and
female:15). A pretest was conducted giving the standard Questionnaire and observed
karate fights by outstanding. Psychological intervention actions were applied to all
subjects in eight weeks. While personal examination, goal setting, tactical thinking, operational
thinking, performance task, study conditions of the contrary, etc., were applied
during the eight weeks. After being post-assessed through the standard questionnaire.
Descriptive statistics and ANCOVA were used to analyze the data using SPSS 21. The
results indicate that all measured variables (thoroughness, control, hesitancy, social
resistance, optimizing, principles, instinctiveness,) have significant differences between
male and female decision-making skills p<0.05 (.000, .000, .000, .000, .008, .002, .000).
Furthermore, results show that mean difference of the male was higher than females.
Finally, observing the practical performance revealed that the psychological intervention
actions of the females are not sufficiently better than the males in terms of decisionmaking
behavior to improve karate performance during combat.
