This study aimed to identify the type and effectiveness of emotional regulation strategies used by table tennis players to manage their emotions experienced during competition. Using a naturalistic video-assisted approach, 30 interviews were conducted with 11 national table tennis players. Ten emotions were identified in the participants’ transcriptions: anger, anxiety, discouragement, disappointment, disgust, joy, serenity, relief, hope, and pride. Qualitative analyses of participants’ transcriptions revealed the emergence of 4 categories pertaining to emotion regulation: (a) regulation efforts comprising: (i) antecedent-focused regulation (e.g., attention deployment, cognitive change); (ii) response-focused regulation (e.g., behavioral regulation, physiological regulation); and (iii) social support; (b) automatic regulation; (c) no regulation; and (d) regulation effectiveness. Quantitative analyses of participants’ transcriptions revealed that: (a) attention deployment strategies emerged as the emotional regulation strategies the most used by participants; (b) some strategies were preferentially used to manage particular emotions during competition (e.g., physiological regulation strategies were essentially used to manage anxiety); (c) automaticity of emotion regulation was strongly associated with a high perceived effectiveness; (d) automatic strategies were associated with specific emotions such as joy, relief, or anger; (e) positive emotions were almost always managed well; (f) a large variability in the emotional regulation effectiveness of negative emotions appeared; disgust, discouragement, and anxiety being the emotions the least efficaciously regulated; and (g) athletes who rated selected emotional regulation strategies as effective really performed well and those who rated selected emotional regulation strategies as ineffective really failed to perform up to their potential. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

The purposes of the current study were to identify affective profiles of athletes both before and during the competition and to examine differences between these profiles on coping and attainment of sport goals among a sample of 306 athletes. The results of hierarchical (Ward’s method) and nonhierarchical (k means) cluster analyses revealed four different clusters both before and during the competition. The four clusters were very similar at the two measurement occasions: high positive affect facilitators (n = 88 and 81), facilitators (n = 75 and 25), low affect debilitators (n = 83 and 127), and high negative affect debilitators (n = 60 and 73). Results of MANOVAs revealed that coping and attainment of sport achievement goal significantly differed across the affective profiles. Results are discussed in terms of current research on positive and negative affective states.

Psychological stress and recovery monitoring is a key issue for increasing athletes' health, well-being, and performance. This multi-study report examined changes and the dose-response relationships between recovery-stress psychological states, training load (TL), heart rate (HR), heart rate recovery (HRR), and heart rate variability (HRV) while providing evidence for the factorial validity of a short French version of the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes (RESTQ-36-R-Sport). Four hundred and seventy-three university athletes (Study 1), 72 full expert swimmers (Study 2), and 11 national to international swimmers (Study 3) participated in the study. Data were analyzed through confirmatory factor analyses (Study 1), repeated ANOVAs and correlational analyses (Study 2), t tests and correlational analyses (Study 3). Multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses showed that the RESTQ-36-R-Sport scores were partially invariant across gender, type of sport, and practice level (Study 1). A dose-response relationship was performed between TL and RESTQ-36-R-Sport scores during an ecological training program (Study 2). Finally, relationships were found between physiological (HRR) and psychological (RESTQ-36-R-Sport) states during an ecological tapering period leading to a national championship (Study 3). As a whole, these findings provided evidence for the usefulness of the short version of the RESTQ-36-R-Sport for regular monitoring to prevent potential maladaptation due to intensive competitive sport practice.

This study examined the relationship between perceived coaching behaviors, coping strategies during a sport competition, and sport achievement. A prospective design was used in which 80 athletes from individual sports completed measures of perceived coaching behaviors two days before a competition (Time 1) and measures of coping and sport achievement within three hours after a sport competition (Time 2). As expected, results of multiple regressions indicated that supportive coaching was a positive predictor of task-oriented coping and sport achievement whereas unsupportive coaching was a positive predictor of disengagement-oriented coping. Both types of coping were significantly associated with sport achievement. Task-oriented coping was a significant partial mediator in the relation between supportive coaching and sport achievement. This study, which contributes to both the coaching and coping literatures, highlights the role of supportive coaching behaviors in the initiation of effective stress management during sport competitions.

This study investigated time patterns and the relationships between perceived stress, recovery, control, attention lapses, and defense mechanisms (DM) during a 12-month wintering in Concordia polar station with an international crew of 14 volunteers. This ICE (Isolated, Confined, Extreme) environment induced some stress, mainly in the social dimension and showed relationships (a) between DM and both stress and recovery and (b) between recovery and perceived control, highlighting the roles of DM and control in psychological adaptation. These results offer additional insights into the affective, social, and cognitive processes involved in adaptation. The findings suggest that preventive psychological countermeasures should be developed for crew members to counteract detrimental psychological outcomes and to improve adaptation to long-duration ICE situations such as planned human interplanetary space missions.