Psychological resilience in sport performers: a review of stressors and protective factors
By Mustafa Sarkar, D. Fletcher. Jurnal sport science, 2014
613 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Psychological resilience is important in sport because athletes must utilise and optimise a range of mental qualities to withstand the pressures that they experience. In this article, we discuss psychological resilience in sport performers via a review of the stressors athletes encounter and the protective factors that help them withstand these demands. It is hoped that synthesising what is known in these areas will help researchers gain a deeper profundity of resilience in sport, and also provide a rigorous and robust foundation for the development of a sport-specific measure of resilience. With these points in mind, we divided the narrative into two main sections. In the first section, we review the different types of stressors encountered by sport performers under three main categories: competitive, organisational and personal. Based on our recent research examining psychological resilience in Olympics champions, in the second section we discuss the five main families of psychological factors (viz. positive personality, motivation, confidence, focus, perceived social support) that protect the best athletes from the potential negative effect of stressors. It is anticipated that this review will help sport psychology researchers examine the interplay between stressors and protective factors, which will, in turn, focus the analytical lens on the processes underlying psychological resilience in athletes.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1caa48707b599e897f558b3743954fc59d4e4acd
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In Clinical Psychology
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Social Psychology
- Aleksandar E. Chinkov
- A. Kuettel
- W. Lee
- Deirdre O’Shea
- Stephen P. Gonzalez
- Y. Chang
- Carsten Hvid Larsen
- Yawen Hsu
Citations in the corpus
- Implicit Transfer of Life Skills Through Participation in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (2016, background): “Skills such as perseverance may reflect the concept of psychological resilience, which generally refers to one’s ability to maintain an optimal healthy functioning under adversity (Sarkar & Fletcher, 2014).”
- Validity and Reliability of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) in Competitive Sport (2016, background): “…the individual level, has limited evidence for the selection and inclusion of some of the items, was developed and utilized in clinical settings, and has considerable conceptual overlap with coping (see Ahern et al., 2006; Pangallo et al., 2015; Sarkar & Fletcher, 2013; 2014b; Windle et al. 2011).”
- Stressing the relevance of resilience: a systematic review of resilience across the domains of sport and work (2017, background): “…adversities and developmental backgrounds (Brown et al., 2015; Fletcher & Sarkar, 2012; Galli & Vealey, 2008; Mills, Butt, Maynard, & Harwood, 2012; Sarkar & Fletcher, 2014b; Sarkar et al., 2015), and six studies focused on current medium-term career endeavours and adversities (Galli & Reel, 2012;…”
- Interaction of athletes' resilience and coaches' social support on the stress-burnout relationship: A conjunctive moderation perspective (2016, background): “Empirical sport stress research provides one approach to this issue by suggesting that resilient athletes can adapt well even when encountering adversities and stressors (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013; Galli & Gonzalez, 2014; Sarkar & Fletcher, 2013, 2014; Sarkar, Fletcher,& Brown, 2015).”
- Risk and protective factors for mental health in elite athletes: a scoping review (2019, background): “…and associations and classified them as either protective or risk factors for athletes’ MH. Thirdly, based on the previous literature (e.g., Rice et al., 2016; Sarkar & Fletcher, 2014) and our own understanding of MH factors, we grouped the correlates/associations into overarching factor themes.”
- Preliminary psychometric validation of a brief screening tool for athlete mental health among male elite athletes: the Athlete Psychological Strain Questionnaire (2019, background): “…pressures and maintaining an athletic career or position security) or personal in nature (e.g. non-sporting issues such as the work-life interface, financial problems, or relationship difficulties) (Jones & Tenenbaum, 2009; Mellalieu, Neil, Hanton, & Fletcher, 2009; Sarkar & Fletcher, 2014).”