Sport Psychology Team Says “Grazie, Italia!”
Edson Filho (l) and several BU Wheelock graduate students, including Dhruv Raman and Piotr Piasecki (second from right and far right)
Sport Psychology Team Says “Grazie, Italia!”
BU Wheelock faculty and grad students present at international conference
BU Wheelock was well represented at the 16th Annual European Congress of Sport and Exercise Psychology, an international conference for sport and exercise psychology research. Organized by the European Federation of Sport Psychology (FEPSAC, using the organization’s French initials), the conference took place in Padua, Italy—Padova in Italian—from July 11 to 16. Edson Filho, an associate professor of sport, exercise, and performance psychology, presented at the conference alongside a group of master’s and PhD students. Filho is the director of the Performance Recovery & Optimization Lab (PRO Lab), a multidisciplinary research initiative that studies how athletes reach and maintain well-being and peak performance.
Filho and two of his doctoral students, Dhruv Raman and Piotr Piasecki, reflected on their experiences at FEPSAC and the research they presented. “We looked at how virtual reality can be used to train rowers,” says Filho of one study. “We found that virtual-reality training can enhance athletic performance—it provides athletes with a multisensory experience.”
Another study focused on stress and burnout among high school athletes. “We connected athletic and academic burnout during the preseason and the postseason. Athletes rest less during the preseason, which is problematic in the long term as it may lead to burnout,” Filho says.
For Raman and Piasecki, FEPSAC was an exciting opportunity to present at a conference. Raman, a first-year PhD student in the counseling psychology program, presented a meta-analysis on the brain functioning of high-performing athletes. “We wanted to see how a specific verbal-motor brain pathway works differently in expert athletes compared to novices,” he says. “We found studies published in the field ranging from the early 2000s to 2020 and presented our findings at the conference. We found that expert athletes have ‘quieter’ brains than novices’.”
Piasecki, a second-year counseling psychology PhD student, worked with Filho on a study about the effects of peer leadership on team cohesion and confidence. The study investigated how peer leadership on the field can affect athletic performance, along with ways that teammates encourage one another and socialize in between games.
This year’s FEPSAC was notable for another reason: For some on the PRO Lab team, it was the first in-person conference they attended since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was surreal to be in Italy for the conference,” says Raman. Piasecki adds, “The relational piece gets lost through a screen if you have attended a virtual one. There is no ‘in-between’ time where you mingle and meet people who are just as passionate about the field as you are. For me, that’s what makes a conference.”
Filho and his students extolled the benefits of FEPSAC—which he called “one of the strongest conferences in the field”—for student researchers. “For the students, I think it was the whole experience: how big the field is, how big the world is,” Filho says. “FEPSAC helped me connect and reconnect with a community of sport psychology researchers and practitioners from all over the world.”
“I am now a lot more familiar with their work, and I have increased opportunities to collaborate with them,” Raman says. Piasecki adds, “The diversity was incredible, and not only in ideas, but countries, ethnicities, and the various experiences people shared were so rich.”