SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1618617
This article is part of the Research TopicMental Health in Recreational and Elite SportsView all 27 articles
Optimal Dosage and Effectiveness of Imagery Practice on Athletes' Mental Health: A Bayesian Multilevel Meta-Analysis
Provisionally accepted
- Macao Polytechnic University, Macau, Macao, SAR China
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While imagery practice is effective for performance enhancement, its impact on mental health is inconclusive due to mixed findings and heterogeneous athlete populations. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness and optimal dosage of imagery practice on athletes' mental health outcomes. A total of 24 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), encompassing 1,294 athletes, were synthesized using a Bayesian multilevel meta-analysis in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines.Among them, 623 were male and 375 were female; the remaining 296 participants were from studies that did not report sex-specific data. The included trials spanned diverse continents (e.g., America, Asia, Europe), covered a wide age range (from adolescents to adults), and involved both individual and team sports (e.g., gymnastics, soccer, swimming). A Bayesian multilevel approach was selected to account for potential clustering within studies and to provide full posterior distributions for effect estimates, allowing for more robust inferences under uncertainty. Our research indicate that imagery practice may improve athletes' mental health [μ(SMD): 0.5,
Keywords: Imagery practice, Psychological skills training, Athletes, Mental Health, Sports
Received: 26 Apr 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Zhao, Ng, Liu, Liang, Iao and Ning. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shiao Zhao, Macao Polytechnic University, Macau, Macao, SAR China
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