Background: Perfectionism is one of the personality traits that has been the focus of researchers in the field of sports psychology and it affects the professional performance of athletes. In addition, cognitive flexibility, competitive anxiety and sports self-efficacy are each somehow related to perfectionism in athletes. Considering the cognitive nature of perfectionism, cognitive bias modification can be one of the effective interventions in this field.
Aim: The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of cognitive bias modification towards perfectionism on cognitive flexibility, competitive anxiety and self-efficacy of perfectionist athelete students.
Methodology: In terms of methodology, the current research was semi-experimental, pre-test and post-test with a control group. The population of this research was 200 student athletes of the Persian Gulf University in Bushehr, who were between the ages of 19 and 24. Among these 200 people who filled the perfectionism questionnaire, 130 people who got a score higher than 100 in the perfectionism questionnaire were selected, and then 40 people were randomly selected and then randomly divided into two groups. Control and case (20 athletes for control group and 20 atheletes for case group) were divided. Both case and control groups filled out cognitive flexibility, competitive anxiety and sports self-efficacy questionnaires. Then, the intervention sessions were held individually and generally in 10 sessions. The first session was dedicated to measuring bias and both the case group and the control group participated in it. From the second to the ninth session (8 sessions), cognitive bias modification sessions were conducted only on the case group, and finally, a measurement session (10th session) was conducted on both case and control groups, and athletes were filled perfectionism, cognitive flexibility, filled competitive anxiety and sports self-efficacy questionnaires again as the post-test.
Conclusions: