RESEARCH THE COGNITIVE AND PATHOLOGIC CONATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF HANDBALL PLAYERS FROM DIFFERENT COMPETITION LEVEL

The research was conducted on a sample of 180 handball players classified into 3 subsamples of 60 athletes who are competing in I, II and republic handball Serbian league, with the application of 15 variables (3 cognitive and 12 conative). The aim was to estimate if there are significant differences between athletes from different competition levels. Data processing was conducted using canonical discriminative analysis, and the results showed that statistically significant difference exist between handball players from different competition levels in all systems (multivariate) estimated by cognitive and conative variables. In cognitive area 91.73% of the significant interclass differences between I league handball players and handball players from other two levels of competition were estimated by efficiency parallel area S1 test. In cognitive area, the correlations were 0.58 and 0.31, which is 82.82% and 17.11% of variance. In the I league handball players, from all measured parametres, there were only phatological symptoms which refer to depression, hypersensitivity and paranoia, which could be a consequence of greater engagement of cognitive processes and the fear of not fulfilling the expectations set before them, and the complexity of the task, and whether they will continue to pursue their career with even greater success, which is contrary to the results obtained in athletes of the lower ranking, where the pathological concurrent factors are present to a larger extent, indicating a very high level of their somatic anxiety and a higher loading of defense mechanisms and regulators of organic functions. Acta Medica Medianae 2019;58(3):159-167.