Paul McCarthy

I am a chartered sport psychologist working with athletes at amateur and professional levels. My research spans social, cognitive and biological psychology. In particular, I am interested in three lines of research. First, understanding how emotions (especially positive emotions) influence motivation and attention in sport performers. This research also examines the development of expertise from a social (e.g., developmental activities) and cognitive perspective (e.g., expert-novice differences in learning using eye-tracking). Second, my colleagues and I examine challenge and threat motivation in sport performers from a social and biological psychology perspective. Finally, I explore interventions to examine how teams could perform more effectively through personal disclosure and mutual sharing.