Abstract:Sport psychology is an applied branch of psychology and a discipline to study the psychological foundation, characteristics and laws of sport activity. Competition psychology and exercise psychology are two important areas of this discipline. The former focuses on pursuing excellence through psychological intervention, i.e., how to help athletes achieve the best performance in high-level competitions and healthy life-long self-development while the later focuses on keeping healthy, i.e., how to help people participate in and enjoy happiness from physical activities, establish life-long exercise habit, and keep the physical and mental health. This paper introduced the findings of sport psychology research on motor perception and decision making, optimization and simplification of function, choking and peak performance, burnout, mental training, exercise motivation and psychological benefits of exercise. Analyzed also were the possibility of promoting quality of life through sport activities.