Sport Psychology in China

Abstract

Although psychology has been established in China since 1920, sport psychology as an organized discipline is only a decade old. Psychology departments are found in only five of China's approximately 1100 tertiary educational institutions. Although sport psychology in not taught in any of the psychology departments, it is taught within at least 50 departments of physical education. Unlike the Western world where much of the focus of sport psychology is on exercise, in China the concentration is restricted mainly to sporting activities. An analysis of three major Chinese journals in 1992 showed that 24 papers in sport psychology had been published (versus 18 papers in cognition and perception, the next most frequent area). This indicated that, in terms of number of publications, sport was the most researched area of Chinese psychology.