Effect of Self-Talk and Different Grammatical Forms on the Performance of Force-Production Task

The present study was aimed to determine the effect of self-talk and different grammatical forms on the performance of force-production task. 80 right-handed men were selected by availability sampling and randomly assigned to four groups. The experimental protocol included motivational self-talks consisting of using sentences with singular first person pronoun “I can", the singular second person pronoun “you can", and the plural first person pronoun “we can”, and for the control group, the protocol was not administered before trials. In each effort group, participants were asked to complete three maximal repetitions with 100% effort. The results of two-way ANOVA combined with the repeated measurements showed that, "I can" and "You can" self-talks led to a significant improvement in the production task performance. However, the "we can" self-talks did not have a significant effect on the task performance (P<0.05).