ABSTRACT
Delineating the psychological factors that discriminate expertise levels is important to understanding disparate competitive outcomes. Development and validation of psychological measurement tools is accomplished through statistical procedures known as exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Motivation is a consequence of both internal and external factors that modify behavior. Motives are more transient than personality, more stable than discrete emotions, and directly impacted by dispositional characteristics such as trait anxiety and personality. In sport, achievement motivation represents the processes that stimulate pursuit of skill competence. Achievement motives underlie the development of superior skills that can be oriented to attainment of competitive objectives. Equivocal research exists with regards to how attention differentiates athletes with varying expertise levels. Sport psychologists have developed numerous measures of psychological constructs that have been increasingly implemented to gain an understanding of the psychological factors that may be necessary for expert sport performance.
