This article presents the development and the preliminary validation of the Sports Competition Rumination Scale (SCRS). The SCRS is designed to measure ruminative thoughts referring to competition-related problems in athletes. It is an adapted version of an existing rumination scale in which we have changed the context for sport-specific purposes. The SCRS consists of eight items, which capture key characteristics of rumination (e.g., repetitiveness, intrusiveness) in the competitive context. In two studies, we investigated its construct validity in terms of its factorial validity and its position within a nomological network. Data collected from 355 athletes (N_Study1 = 157, N_Study2 = 198) revealed a good factorial validity for the scale across samples. The SCRS showed a good internal consistency. Moreover, moderate relations to established rumination measures from clinical and general psychology supported its position in the nomological network. In addition, the SCRS showed low to moderate relations to different general as well as sports-specific anxiety measures. The present study provides an important preliminary evidence for a useful, reliable, and ecological measure of rumination about competition-related problems. Lay Summary: Repetitive and intrusive thoughts (rumination) are a prominent topic in psychology due to the strong relation to depression, individuals’ well-being, and various performance parameters. However, little research has focused on rumination in the context of sports. Here we describe the development of a sports-specific rumination measure for the competitive context.

Athletic performance in competitive sports relies heavily on the ability to cope effectively with stressful situations. In contrast, some athletes report that their thoughts revolve around the future or past and not around the actual demands during competitions. In those specific stressful situations, the lack of focus like an unintended fixation on repetitive cognitions can have fatal consequences with regard to the performance. Especially when competitors are close in their athletic capabilities, differences in effectively coping with stress and mental stability may decide about winning and losing. One established factor of performing effectively under pressure is the individual tendency to either focus on taking action (i.e., action orientation) or on focusing on the own emotions (i.e., state orientation). It is widely acknowledged that state-oriented athletes have disadvantages in performing under stress. Moreover, the action control theory claims that state orientation is related to ruminative cognitions, which itself is assumed to impair performance in the long term. We tested this hypothesis in 157 competitive athletes from different sports (including individual and team sports). Regression analysis demonstrates a substantial correlation of failure-related action orientation (i.e., state orientation) with different measures of rumination (including general, clinically relevant, and competition-related rumination). In addition, general (i.e., content independent) rumination also correlated substantially with a rumination scale adapted specifically to sports-related competition. These results suggest (1) that a sports and competition-related ruminative mechanism exists and (2) that ruminative cognitions are related to the cognitive basis of state orientation. While our study does not allow for a causal interpretation, it provides an additional approach to investigate mental factors underlying inter-individual differences in athletic performance under stress and pressure.

In this article, we conducted the first meaningful study of irrational beliefs (IBs) in a German sample of athletes. Moreover, we investigated associations between IBs and potential general as well as sport-specific markers of mental health in German athletes. As general markers, we considered psychological distress and wellbeing in addition to IBs, and as sport-specific markers, we considered anxiety, perfectionism, and athletic identity. To achieve this, our first step was to translate and validate a specific measure of irrational beliefs, namely the Irrational Performance Beliefs Inventory (iPBI). The iPBI is a performance-relevant measure that captures specific IB, taking into account the situational circumstances of the target population, namely operators in different performance context (academia, sports, business, medicine, etc.). Its theoretical basis is largely Ellis’ work on rational and irrational beliefs. We developed a short and a long version of the iPBI, which both capture four core IBs (i.e., demandingness, awfulization, low frustration tolerance, and depreciation). Factorial validity was confirmed by a confirmatory factor analysis (comparative fit index = 0.92) with data from 234 athletes. Both versions of the newly developed iPBI showed good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.77) and retest reliability (intra-class correlation coefficients >0.71). Results of the correlational analyses indicated low positive relationships between IBs and athletes’ psychological distress, and low negative relations between IBs and wellbeing. In terms of sport-specific markers, there were low to moderate correlations with IBs. This study also examined the differences in IBs between females and males, individual and team sport athletes, and across three different performance levels. Implications of these findings are discussed along with approaches for future research and applied work.

Sports injuries are ubiquitous and can have far-reaching consequences for athletes (e.g., health, performance). Previous studies have examined various psychosocial influencing factors (e.g., stress), but have mostly focused on only one or two injury characteristics (e.g., frequency), neglecting the broader injury pattern. Thus, the present study aimed to obtain a more differentiated picture of potentially different injury patterns and related profiles of psychosocial factors. We investigated a sample of 213 athletes from a cross-sectional online study. Current injury status, frequency, severity, chronicity, medical treatment, and rehabilitation measures were subjected to cluster analysis indicating a 3-cluster solution with predominantly chronically injured athletes (n = 54), athletes not seeking treatment (n = 62), and athletes utilizing medical treatment and rehabilitation (n = 97). Building on the Model of Stress and Athletic Injury, we subsequently conducted three multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) to examine whether the obtained clusters differed in terms of personality factors (e.g., athletic identity), history of stressors (e.g., life events), and coping resources (e.g., self-compassion). We observed significant differences in all three categories of psychosocial variables implying different intervention possibilities for different injury patterns in the future.

Self-regulation, especially the regulation of emotion, is an important component of athletic performance. In our study, we tested the effect of a self-distancing strategy on athletes’ performance in an aggression-inducing experimental task in the laboratory. To this end, we modified an established paradigm of interpersonal provocation [Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP)], which has the potential to complement field studies in order to increase our understanding of effective emotion regulation of athletes in critical situations in competitions. In our experimental setting, we first tested the applicability of the self-distancing perspective and the athletes’ ability to dynamically adapt besides the self-distanced perspective a self-immersed perspective to provocation in the TAP. Secondly, we investigated how this altered perspective modulated regulatory abilities of negative affectivity, anger, and aggression. The experiment consisted of two conditions in which the participant adopted either a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective. Forty athletes (female: 23; male: 17) from different team (n = 27) and individual sports (n = 13) with a mean age of 23.83 years (SD = 3.41) competed individually in a reaction-time task against a (fictitious) opponent. Results show that athletes are equally able to adopt both perspectives. In addition, within-person analyses indicate that self-distancing decreased aggressive behavior and negative affect compared to the self-immersed perspective. Our results suggest that self-distancing modulates different levels of athletes’ experience (i.e., affect and anger) and behavior. Furthermore, this demonstrates the feasibility of testing self-regulation of emotion in athletes in a laboratory setting and allows for further application in research in sports and exercise psychology.

Based on previous studies, the present four experiments (total N = 468) aimed at investigating the effectivity of rumination induction in different experimental settings. We were particularly interested in rumination in the context of individual goal achievement and tested whether an instruction that referred to unresolved goals had a direct observable effect on state rumination. For this purpose, participants were asked to identify, evaluate, and focus on a personally relevant goal that was previously unresolved and still bothered them. In Experiment 1a to 1c, we compared three different modifications of the unresolved condition with shortened instructions with the elaborated unresolved condition and an additional control condition that did not refer to goals. In general, the results were mixed, but basically confirmed the effectiveness of the method used. Finally, in Experiment 2, we compared the two most promising versions of the unresolved condition and, by adding a goal-related control condition, we examined which control condition was best suited to maximize effects related to state rumination in future research. Results of various mixed ANOVAs demonstrated that a shortened version (in terms of shortened audio instructions) of the unresolved condition could be used as well as the original unresolved condition to induce reliable state rumination. The significance of the effects obtained with this method for real-life applications as well as approaches for future research are discussed.