A belief that ‘I can,’ and what it does to fear and flow

A Korean review of overseas work sets five studies beside one another, all concerned with what happens in a golfer’s mind and how that reaches the next shot. The first, and the one that frames the rest here, is Lee and Kang, in 2024, published as an advance online article in Perceptual and Motor Skills: The mental game of golf: Understanding relationships between self-efficacy, fear of failure, competitive state anxiety, and flow.

The question was how those four states sit together, and how a player’s inner weather might bear on play. The assumption that self-efficacy might reduce the harder feelings and make flow more likely is what made the work interesting to the reviewer. Three hundred and seventy-five elite adult golfers took part, all with experience in meets at national level or above. They answered established scales for the four states, in a self-report form. The paths were read with a structural equation model, after a reliability check and a look at whether the flow of the data fitted the theory, so that the results might later be used in mental training.

The result that stands out is simple enough. The stronger the sense that ‘I can do this,’ the less fear of failure, and the less anxiety in competition. Players who held that belief were less shaken by a mistake, and less likely to lose their composure in a meet. That state is treated as a help in keeping a score together. Competitive anxiety, for its part, sat badly with flow. The implication drawn is that better play needs more than technical practice: work on self-efficacy and on the control of anxiety should go with it. Those findings are left with the 2024 study.

Visualization, self-talk, and a short hypnosis programme

Morahan’s 2018 master’s thesis, at Western Carolina University, Effects of psychological skills training on golf performance, used a single-subject design to watch that training at work. Two methods were used, visualization and self-talk. The reviewer, already interested in sport psychology, wanted to see how those skills join actual play. A PETTLEP approach was used, so that practice would stay close to a real playing setting rather than remain a classroom exercise. The visualization group learned to picture a stroke vividly; the self-talk group learned to cut back negative thoughts and to bring a better sentence to mind in play. Putting and pitching were measured again and again after a period of training.

Some participants showed a clear lift: more accurate putting, a more concentrated pitching stroke. Not everyone did. The difference is put down to how far a person entered into the work, to temperament, and to habits of mind already in place. A method, by itself, is not enough; a person’s readiness and the degree of practice have to go with it.

Pates and Cowen, in 2013, in the International Journal of Golf Science, followed a narrower case: one 22-year-old man in his first year on a European professional tour, who had had five years of technical training only and had not tried hypnosis before. An AB single-subject design was chosen because the effect of the work could not be cleanly withdrawn, and because change in one person can still be tracked with some clarity. Data were taken across twelve weeks and eleven real events. After a stable baseline, a three-step programme began: hypnotic induction centred on relaxation and breathing; a regression to the memory of a best past round; and a trigger, so that the feel of taking the club could bring that state back. One live session was followed by seven days of recorded practice, heard daily.

Mean score moved from 75.5 strokes at baseline to 71.1 after the intervention; a flow score moved from 115.5 to 133.7. On a visual reading the two periods sat clearly apart, with little overlap. The player said image training had helped him keep concentration and had eased anger. The limits are plain: one person, and both researcher and player knew what was being tried, so expectancy or an observer effect cannot be ruled out. Those figures are left with the 2013 study.

Emotion after each hole, and the tiredness that shows in a putt

Lundkvist, Gustafsson, Björklund, Davis, and Ivarsson, in 2021, also in Perceptual and Motor Skills, asked how a player’s felt emotions — irritation, tension, nervousness — sat with task-oriented coping, a sense of control, and actual play. Golf is a long round, and feeling keeps changing; that is why a repeated self-rating, hole by hole, was of interest. Twenty-eight golfers on a Swedish amateur tour, mostly men, with a mean handicap of 4.94, marked those states on a visual analogue scale after each hole of an 18-hole tournament round. A Bayesian multivariate autoregressive model was used, suited to measures taken again and again over time. Earlier work had often compared a feeling only before and after a round, or had stayed in a laboratory; this study stayed in a real event.

The stronger path was from the result of a hole to the feeling on the next, not the other way. A poor hole raised nervousness and tension; a good one lifted the mood. Feeling, in that reading, can be more a result than a cause. The effect of feeling on play was weaker, and varied from person to person; better players were better at keeping a bad mood out of the next shot. In the middle stretch, holes 7 to 12, irritation sometimes even helped the next hole — a hint that a feeling is not only a hindrance, and can, at times, sharpen attention or motive. The limit is that the marks were by the hole, not just before each shot. Those findings are left with the 2021 study.

Pan, Soh, Jaafar, Soh, Deng, Cao, Li, and Liu, in 2025, in PLOS ONE, reviewed mental fatigue in golf. Plenty of earlier work had stayed with putting; less had been gathered on the round as a whole. Of 725 pieces screened, ten met the criteria, under a PICOS frame, with only work on healthy golfers and a link between fatigue and play included, and with quality read on QualSyst. The set mixed real play (including 36-hole events), laboratory work, and simulation, and both randomised and non-randomised designs. Fatigue had been produced by 36-hole continuous play, by dual tasks, and by letter-omission writing; attempts to ease it included caffeine, a carbohydrate supplement, and self-talk. Some studies used a self-report scale, others a performance task.

Putting was the skill most clearly hurt. After fatigue had been induced in the laboratory, putting accuracy usually fell, and so did concentration and reaction time. In some of the work, caffeine or self-talk eased the fatigue and putting improved again. In a game that asks for hard judgements and a repeated movement, fatigue can break the run of a round and can also hurt a strategic choice. The limits are stated plainly: most of the ten studies looked at putting alone, not irons, drives, or bunker play, and only three were set in a real 18-hole event, so a wider claim is not made. Those findings are left with the 2025 review. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Lee, D., and Kang, S. (2024). The mental game of golf: Understanding relationships between self-efficacy, fear of failure, competitive state anxiety, and flow. Perceptual and Motor Skills, advance online publication.
2. Morahan, A. (2018). Effects of psychological skills training on golf performance. Master’s thesis, Western Carolina University.
3. Lundkvist, E., Gustafsson, H., Björklund, G., Davis, P., and Ivarsson, A. (2021). Relating competitive golfers’ perceived emotions and performance. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 128(4), 1549–1568.
4. Pan, X., Soh, K. G., Jaafar, W. M. W., Soh, K. L., Deng, N., Cao, S., Li, M., and Liu, H. (2025). Mental fatigue in golf: A systematic review. PLOS ONE, 20(2), e0310403.
5. Pates, J., and Cowen, A. (2013). The effect of a hypnosis intervention on performance and flow state of an elite golfer: A single-subject design. International Journal of Golf Science, 2(1), 43–53.

Last updated: 14 November 2026