META Research

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• published: 11 Jun 2015
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META is an acronym that refers to meta-Motivation, meta-Emotion and Thinking and Action (metacognition). The goal of the research group is to combine perspectives from researchers in social, cognitive, organisational and sport psychology to enhance our understanding of expertise. This META research group (www.meta-research.org) was initiated by UL staff, Dr. Tadhg MacIntyre (PESS), Dr. Eric Igou (Psychology) and Dr. Deirdre O’Shea (KBS) with collaborators including Prof. Andy Lane (University of Wolverhampton), Prof. Marc Jones (Staffordshire University), Prof. Aidan Moran (UCD), Dr. Paul McCarthy (Glasgow Caledonian University), along with Prof. Carol McGuinness and Dr. Clifford Stevenson (both Queens University Belfast). Funding from the British Psychological Society (BPS) Research Seminars Competition supports three seminars across the host institutions. Over the past two decades the question of how one becomes an expert within the sport domain has been of increasing scientific (including special issues in Frontiers in Psychology; Psychology of Sport and Exercise) and popular interest (Gladwell, 2008). This was a result of the seminal paper by Ericsson et al. (1993) in which the theory of deliberate practice was first proposed. One limiting factor in the accumulating research literature on this topic is that the focus has been on a narrow set of conclusions from the original publication (Baker & Young, 2014). For example, debate over the quantity (e.g., 10,000 hrs) rather than the quality of the practice has resulted in a lack of studies delving into the explanations of the underlying processes (MacIntyre et al., in press). For instance, what is deliberate about deliberate practice? Are attentional shifting and inhibitory control central to the increased automaticity that is a feature of expertise? Are metacognitive processes integral to the deliberate component of training? How do experts modulate their effort, motivation and emotion over the sustained period required to attain superior reproducible performances? These questions suggest the potential for research on cognitive, emotional and social processes underlying expert performances in order to overcome the limitations of prior research. Conceptual analysis, a process that is all too rare in psychology (Machado & Silva, 2007), has the potential to enable the integration and illumination of the inter-related constructs that have been subject of study among psychologists interested in sport, action and performance (MacIntyre et al., in press). These include topics such as metacognition,  broadly defined by Flavell as “cognition about cognitive phenomena” (1979 p. 906). Increasingly researchers are turning to metacognition to understand human performance (Fleming, 2014) and applying it in a broader context (Perfect & Schwartz, 2009). For example, Bless et al., (2009) proposed that metacognitive abilities have a role in the regulation of emotion (Bless, Keller, and Igou, 2009). Interestingly, they distinguish cognitive feelings from affective feelings and this approach has been reflected by research on meta-emotion. For example, Gottman (1996) postulated that the term meta-emotion does not merely refer to an individual’s emotional reactions to his or her own emotions, but refers also to the “executive functions of emotion.” These new perspectives have influenced the contemporary literature with researchers currently highlighting the potential of metacognitive explanations in understanding attention and emotional regulation (Brick et al., 2014)   In sum, the conceptual analysis and parallel investigation of metacognition, meta-emotion and meta-motivation have the potential to illuminate our understanding of these constructs. The natural laboratory of sport and action provides a context in which the social, cognitive and emotional processes can be elucidated in parallel. The combination of expertise from researchers in social, cognitive, organizational and sport psychology will yield new knowledge which can be translated from theory to practice across a range of contexts.