Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and improving chess performance in promising young chess‑players

Background and objectives

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a model of psychological intervention designed for the treatment of problems related to destructive experiential avoidance. The authors define problematic experiential avoidance as a lifestyle pattern consistent with deliberately avoiding and controlling discomfort in the form of private experiences (thoughts, memories, sensations). Although this pattern provides short-term relief, it produces significant limitations in a person's life by dedicating more time to controlling discomfort than to performing personally valued actions. Although ACT research has focused primarily on psychological disorders, recent literature shows that the technique is also effective in improving athletic performance. In the specific domain of chess, there is substantial evidence supporting the utility of acceptance-based protocols for increasing performance.

The objective of the present study was to replicate and expand the application of brief ACT protocols to improve chess performance in promising young players. The authors base their research on a previous study (Ruiz, 2006) in which a brief 4-session individual ACT protocol was effective with professional chess-players competing at high levels. The present study aimed to determine whether equivalent results would be obtained with a group protocol (rather than individual) applied to promising young players (rather than professional players). The study compared the performance of participants who received the intervention with that of a control group that received no intervention.

Method

Participants

Twenty promising young chess-players from Europe participated in the study. The experimental condition consisted of 8 players (4 males and 4 females) with ages ranging from 14 to 20 years, with a mean age of 16 years (SD = 2.32). These players were selected by the Spanish Chess Federation (FEDA) to participate in a training concentration camp, the context in which the study was conducted.

For the control condition, 12 chess-players were selected from the International Chess Federation (FIDE) database according to their similarity with the experimental participants. Each experimental player was matched with at least one control player according to five criteria: (a) same sex; (b) age difference less than one year; (c) ELO rating difference less than 40 points; (d) similar degree of participation in competitions; and (e) membership in the same country. However, adequate follow-up of the eighth experimental participant was not possible (who had no record in FIDE files), so a control player was not assigned to this participant either. Therefore, the final analysis included 7 experimental participants and their corresponding controls.

Design

The study used a between-groups design with an experimental condition that received intervention and a control condition without intervention. Participants were not randomly assigned (assignment was by convenience through FEDA), constituting a quasi-experimental design. The experimental protocol was applied during a 5-day training concentration camp period. Follow-up of performance extended for the time necessary for participants to complete a minimum of nine tournaments, which spanned an average of 9 months.

Intervention

The experimental protocol consisted of teaching participants to detect psychological barriers that interfered with their performance and to practice psychological distancing from these barriers, applying this skill to problematic competition situations. The intervention was developed over the 5 days of the concentration camp with a specific structure:

Day 1: An activity was conducted with the objective of generating psychological barriers that would be worked with in subsequent days. Participants played matches against the Fritz 8 computer program with a time control of 2 minutes of thinking for the entire game plus 4 seconds after each move. During the matches, they heard discouraging noises and formally discouraging phrases (for example, "I'm going to make a mistake," "the program plays very well") through headphones.

Day 2: Participants discussed the troubling thoughts and sensations generated during the previous day's matches. Several psychological distancing exercises were conducted for approximately 30 minutes, as a group, as training in multiple examples to promote differentiation of the self as context. Exercises included: (1) examples in which "nothing is done" with private events (observing sensations without acting on them); (2) card exercise (writing troubling thoughts on cards to observe them without judgment); and (3) autumn leaves exercise (imagining troubling thoughts as leaves falling from a tree and carried by a river). At the end, participants were invited to use what they learned in a couple of practice matches against the computer.

Day 3: Participants played against the computer again after briefly reviewing the previous day's protocol.

Days 4 and 5: An intervention of approximately 3 hours total duration was conducted. It consisted of a review of the psychological barriers that typically appear during competition and analysis of how participants reacted to them. If they reacted counterproductively, creative hopelessness and psychological distancing from problematic private events were used. The intervention included metaphors (for example, "the man in the field of holes," "the puddle metaphor," "the bus metaphor") and experiential exercises to physically enact the ability to continue directing behavior toward valued objectives despite the presence of aversive private events. Participants were invited to practice these exercises during competition the following week.

Outcome measures

Primary outcome measure:

• Chess performance: Measured through the performance score obtained from the FIDE archive. The performance score was calculated for each tournament completed by the player (when at least four games were included). A difference of more than 40 points in performance between the period before and after the intervention was established as the change criterion.

Process measures:

• Acceptance and Action Questionnaire version II (AAQ-II): A Spanish adaptation conducted by the authors. A generic measure of experiential avoidance and psychological acceptance. It consists of 10 items with a 7-point Likert scale. Higher scores indicate greater experiential avoidance and lower acceptance. The change criterion selected was a 15% decrease in the total score.

• Chess Problematic Reactions Questionnaire (CRPA in Spanish): An instrument specific to the chess domain measuring problematic reactions to different private events during competition. It consists of 15 items with a Likert scale from 1 to 9 (where 1 = never and 9 = always). Higher scores indicate greater frequency of problematic reactions. A small exploratory study with 17 high-level chess-players showed a statistically significant positive correlation between CRPA and AAQ-II (r = .61), as well as negative correlation of both questionnaires with ELO rating (CRPA and ELO: r = -.44; AAQ-II and ELO: r = -.347). The change criterion was a 15% decrease in the total score.

Questionnaires were administered before the intervention and at 2, 4, and 6 months.

Data analysis

Mean performance scores for each condition from the nine tournaments before and after the intervention were compared using Student's t-test for independent samples. Effect sizes for the intervention for each dependent variable were analyzed using Cohen's d.

Results

Figure 1 shows the differential score obtained across the 9 tournaments before and after the experimental intervention. An appreciable difference was observed between the performance of the experimental and control conditions: five of the seven experimental condition participants exceeded the established change criterion (the remaining two showed little significant improvement), while none of the control condition participants achieved it.

Chess performance: The experimental condition moved from a mean performance before the intervention of 2,252 (SD = 115) to 2,325 (SD = 113) at follow-up, while the control condition moved from 2,267 (SD = 89) to 2,271 (SD = 92), respectively. Statistically significant differences were found at follow-up (p = .024), but not in the period before the intervention (p = .702). The magnitude of the differential effect was medium (d = .52).

Process measures: Data were available for seven of the eight experimental condition participants (participant 3 did not complete the questionnaires). Regarding the CRPA, six months after the intervention, three players (participants 2, 4, and 7) showed a decrease that exceeded the established change criterion. The mean score before the intervention was 77 (SD = 22.32) and at 6 months was 65.85 (SD = 30.74), with effect size d = .42. Additionally, three participants showed significantly lower scores on the AAQ-II at six months (participants 2, 4, and 8), with the mean score before the intervention being 33.85 (SD = 10.49) and at follow-up 28.14 (SD = 10.28), with effect size d = .55.

Correlations: The correlation between CRPA scores at 6-month follow-up and change in chess performance was calculated, finding a positive correlation (r = .49), although not significant due to the small sample size. No correlation was found between decrease in AAQ-II and increase in performance, but a correlation was found between decrease in AAQ-II and decrease in CRPA (r = .37). Pre-treatment levels of experiential avoidance (measured by AAQ-II and CRPA) correlated with improvement in performance at follow-up (AAQ-II and performance increase: r = .47; CRPA and performance increase: r = .81; p < .05).

Discussion and conclusions

Following the intervention, five of the seven experimental condition participants showed a notable improvement in their performance that led them to achieve significantly better rankings in tournaments than their respective controls. The remaining two players showed little relevant improvement in performance. The fact that none of the control group players managed to exceed the change criterion indicates that the criterion is indeed stringent.

Regarding process measures, there was no correlation between improvement in performance and change in experiential avoidance measured by the AAQ. The authors suggest that this could be due, first, to the fact that players' avoidance scores were not high, so significant changes would not be expected; only the eighth participant had a score that could be considered high before the intervention. Second, it could be due to the possible insensitivity of this questionnaire to account for the use of strategies to control psychological barriers during competition.

However, a positive correlation was observed between improvement in chess performance and decrease in problematic reactions to various private events during competition (measured by CRPA), although only three of the seven participants showed a significant decrease. The CRPA has not been formally validated, but was used in previous research (Ruiz & Luciano, 2006) in which a similar correlation was found between decrease in CRPA and increase in performance (r = .47). Therefore, the present study replicates this trend. Other data support the hypothesis that the experimental protocol operated following the change processes hypothesized by ACT, since the effect of the protocol was greater with participants with higher pre-treatment levels of experiential avoidance.

The authors emphasize that the decrease in the impact of psychological barriers on play correlated with improved performance, suggesting that the decrease in problematic reactions that players engaged in when faced with private events with aversive functions was an important aspect of change. The protocol components primarily focused on generating the skill of being able to remain present with cognitive contents in order to choose what type of reaction in the game might be best at any given moment, thus breaking the credibility of thoughts that arise at any moment as literal elements for action.

Limitations

The authors acknowledge several limitations in the study. First, specific measures were not introduced during the intervention process that would allow measurement, for example, of possible decreases in the credibility of thoughts while performing the task. The most relevant limitation is that it is not possible to isolate the effect of mere attention to psychological aspects that was given to the experimental condition participants from the effect of the training concentration camp itself and the effect of the procedure itself. However, the authors enumerate several reasons that counteract this limitation: all participants had a personal trainer with whom they trained regularly; during the concentration camp, all 8 participants trained with only one trainer, so treatment was not personalized; and control subjects also enjoyed competitions or intermediate activities of this type. However, the authors acknowledge that it cannot be completely ruled out that mere attention to psychological aspects could have affected performance, so future studies should establish control conditions that receive at least some attention to the psychological aspects of the game.

Significance and contribution

This work replicates and extends previous research in the field of chess (Ruiz, 2006; Ruiz & Luciano, 2006) regarding the efficacy of a brief application of ACT for increasing the performance of high-level chess-players. The main contribution is that it demonstrates that the protocol is effective not only in individual format (as in previous studies) but also in group format, and not only with professional chess-players but also with adolescents and promising young players. The study is the first group intervention of these characteristics that has proven effective and well-received by promising young players. Additionally, it possesses outstanding methodological characteristics noted by Martin, Vause, and Schwarzman (2005) for research in sport psychology: participants are international-level athletes, the duration of follow-up is unusually long (average of 9 months), and the dependent variable used is a direct measure of performance with high reliability and validity (the FIDE performance score). The results suggest that brief interventions containing the key elements of ACT adapted to the specific characteristics of each population may be useful for increasing human performance in general, whether athletic, occupational, intellectual, etc., in those circumstances in which experiential avoidance, defined by a context of cognitive fusion, plays a limiting role.

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