INTRODUCTION: The role that psychological factors play in influencing sports in general has received much attention in recent sports literature (Cartoni et al. 2005; Pallesen et al. 2006). In this study, the influence of fear, self-efficacy, and worry experienced by young people wishing to learn alpine skiing was investigated. METHODS: The subjects consisted of 126 physical education students who had no previous knowledge of alpine skiing. They were 23.3± 1.66 years of age, 96 were male and 30 were female. After completing three questionnaires (Penn State Worry Questionnaire, Self-efficacy and Fear questionnaire), they were randomly assigned to two equally-sized groups. The groups differed only in the method used to learn alpine skiing. The learning process lasted seven days for both groups, after which the participants were graded on a scale from 1 to 5, according to the demonstrated knowledge of five chosen elements. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The psychological factors examined did not correlate significantly with the level of the alpine skiing knowledge of the subjects in either the control group (Table 1), or in the experimental group. Although participants of the experimental and control groups differed significantly in the level of learned alpine skiing measured through grades obtained for the elements of one turn, short turn, and parallel turn (p=0.03, p=0.01 and p=0.01 respectively), the differences do not appear to be influenced by the psychological factors. CONCLUSION: The results of the study were interesting with respect to the popularity of alpine skiing. The emotions examined did not affect the learning process adversely, therefore, it appears that worry, self-efficacy, and fear are not psychological barriers that prevent the successful learning of alpine skiing by inexperienced youths.
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