14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators from the Tel Aviv University (TAU) say that their latest study supports the hypothesis that becoming engaged with sports helps improve cognitive, emotional and behavior well-being in children.
The impact playing sports had comparable to the effect of being physically fit, the research team also learned. The investigation was led by TAU PhD student Keren Shahar, who looked at data collected from 649 children.
All test participants came from a low socioeconomic background, she explains. Upon enrolling, the kids were included in a continuous program of various sports, and this apparently helped lower their feelings of aggression and improve self-control and discipline in general.
Shahar explains that she became interested in conducting this study because she wanted to know how healthcare policy-makers, parents or teachers could go about using sports as a means of having a positive impact on their children.
Reducing aggression in the young ones was also one of the primary focuses of the research effort. Interestingly, it turns out that playing sports has a more visible effect than other established methods of addressing this problem, such as verbal therapy.
The latter only encourages the kids to control their temper and behavior, the PhD student explains, while at the same time failing to address the negative emotions that led to the development of that type of behavior in the first place.
But sports can definitely reduce the intensity of negative emotions, or even make them go away, Shahar explains. The expert conducted her work over a period of 24 weeks, on kids from 25 schools in Israel.
After the study was concluded, the expert determined that kids who had entered the program exhibited higher levels of self-control, which was defined as including self-observation, problem-solving skills, and delayed gratification, PsychCentral reports.
Ultimately, these factors led to a decrease in the overall incidence of aggression in the study group. Kids in the control group displayed levels of aggression consistent to what experts had measured at the beginning of the study.