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Background The COVID-19 pandemic impacted on the sporting field, with athletes constrained in home isolation without the possibility to train and compete in their usual environments. This situation has been investigated within the theoretical frameworks of athletic identity and cognitive emotion regulation. Objectives The objectives of our investigation were to: (a) validate the athletic identity measurement scale (AIMS) for use in Italian language; and (b) explore differences by gender, typology of sport (individual vs. team), and competitive level (elite vs. non-elite) in athletic identity and in cognitive emotion regulation during the Covid-19 lockdown period. Methods To achieve these objectives, the reliability and construct validity of the Italian version of the AIMS have been tested in Study 1. Multivariate and univariate analyses were run to evaluate differences between different groups of athletes in Study 2. Results Results from Study 1 suggest a 3-factor higher order model of athletic identity. Results from Study 2 highlight that, during this lockdown period, elite athletes and team sports athletes show higher athletic identity. Cognitive emotion regulation strategies are different for gender and for competitive level. Finally, athletes with higher athletic identity tend to ruminate and catastrophize more. Conclusions The present multi-study paper contributes to the theoretical field with a validated measure of athletic identity in Italian language. It also provides some practical implications that could apply in this situation of isolation and can be extended to cases such as those of injury or illness.

The recent global outspread of the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the lives of people across multiple countries including athletes, coaches, and supporting staff. Along with everybody else, coaches found themselves constrained to an at-home self-isolation, which limited their ability to normally engage with their profession and to interact with their athletes. This situation may also have impacted their own psychological well-being. With this study, we explored coaches’ perceptions of stress in relation to their emotion regulation strategies depending upon their gender and competitive level (elite vs. non-elite). A sample of 2272 Italian coaches were surveyed during the period of lockdown. Mean values for perceived stress and emotion regulation strategies were compared to normative data of the two instruments as reported in the original studies. Furthermore, two Multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) were completed to observe the potential differences in the coaches’ emotion regulation strategies and perception of stress. Finally, a blockwise regression analysis was run to assess how coaches’ emotion regulation strategies impacted upon their perception of stress. Both women and men reported higher levels of perceived stress than those reported in the normative data. Similarly, average scores for emotion regulation strategies were significantly different from those reported for normative data, in particular, coaches reported slightly higher use of emotion regulation strategies than participants in the original study. Significant gender-based differences emerged in terms of emotional regulations, with men adopting more suppression than women. No differences by competitive level were found. In terms of perceived stress, male coaches and elite coaches showed to be more in control of the situation (positive stress) than female coaches and non-elite coaches, respectively, while women experienced more negative stress than men. The blockwise regression evidenced how reappraisal resulted to be predictive in helping coaches to reduce their perception of stress, while suppression predicted higher stress perceptions.

This study investigates the assessment of motor imagery (MI) ability in humans. Commonly, MI ability is measured through two methodologies: a self-administered questionnaire (MIQ-3) and the mental chronometry (MC), which measures the temporal discrepancy between the actual and the imagined motor tasks. However, both measures rely on subjects' self-assessment and do not use physiological measures. In this study, we propose a novel set of features extracted from the nonlinear dynamics of the eye gaze signal to discriminate between good and bad imagers. To this aim, we designed an experiment where twenty volunteers, categorized as good or bad imagers according to MC, performed three tasks: a motor task (MT), a visual Imagery task (VI), and a kinaesthetic Imagery task (KI). Throughout the experiment, the subjects' eye gaze was continuously monitored using an eye-tracking system. Eye gaze time series were analyzed through recurrence quantification analysis of the reconstructed phase space and compared between the two groups. Statistical results have shown how nonlinear eye behavior can express an inner dynamics of imagery mental process and may be used as a more objective and physiological-based measure of MI ability.