Impact of Psychological Intervention Actions on Gender in Decision Making

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.