Although athletic burnout is a frequent topic of discussion and speculation, little in the way of a conceptual model or empirical data currently exists. An attempt is made to incorporate what is known about the nature, causes, and consequences of burnout within a cognitive-affective model of stress and to note the parallel situational, cognitive, physiologic, and behavioral components of stress and burnout. Thibaut and Kelley's social exchange model is used to define the conditions under which withdrawal from a sport can be attributed to burnout. Empirical findings concerning the causes and consequences of burnout derived from nonathletic populations are incorporated within the athletic burnout model, and its implications for preventing and coping with burnout are discussed. A number of conceptual and methodological issues are discussed, including operationalizing and measuring athletic burnout, the need for epidemiological research, and the assessment of causal and moderator variables. Based upon the literature on burnout in nonsport environments and the literature on sources and consequences of athletic stress, a number of testable hypotheses are advanced.
This article describes the development and validation of the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 (SAS-2), a multidimensional measure of cognitive and somatic trait anxiety in sport performance settings. Scale development was stimulated by findings that the 3-factor structure of the original Sport Anxiety Scale (SAS; Smith, Smoll, & Schutz, 1990) could not be reproduced in child samples and that several items on the scale produced conflicting factor loadings in adult samples. Alternative items having readability levels of grade 4 or below were therefore written to create a new version suitable for both children and adults. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses replicated the original SAS factor structure at all age levels, yielding separate 5-item subscales for Somatic Anxiety, Worry, and Concentration Disruption in samples as young as 9 to 10 years of age. The SAS-2 has stronger factorial validity than the original scale did, and construct validity research indicates that scores relate to other psychological measures as expected. The scale reliably predicts precompetition state anxiety scores and proved sensitive to anxiety-reduction interventions directed at youth sport coaches and parents.
In an attempt to control for the effects of event type on sex differences in coping, men and women responded to an identical achievement-related stressor under controlled laboratory conditions. Although men and women were similar in their cognitive appraisal of the situation, they nonetheless reported differences in preparatory coping. Women reported seeking social support and using emotion-focused coping to a greater extent than men, whereas men reported using relatively more problem-focused coping than women. The masculinity and femininity of respondents failed to moderate the relation between sex and coping. These results are inconsistent with a purely situational explanation of sex differences in coping but are consistent with the notion that men and women are socialized to cope with stress in different ways.
The mastery approach to coaching is a cognitive-behavioral intervention designed to promote a mastery-involving motivational climate, shown in previous research to be related to lower anxiety in athletes. We tested the effects of this intervention on motivational climate and on changes in male and female athletes'cognitive and somatic performance anxiety over the course of a basketball season. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that the athletes in the intervention condition perceived their coaches as being more mastery-involving on the Motivational Climate Scale for Youth Sports when compared to athletes in an untreated control condition. Relative to athletes who played for untrained coaches, those who played for the trained coaches exhibited decreases on all subscales of the Sport Anxiety Scale-2 and on total anxiety score from preseason to late season. Control group athletes reported increases in anxiety over the season. The intervention had equally positive effects on boys and girls teams.
For 2f consecutive days, 186 male and female college students recalled the most stressful event of the day, recorded how the event was appraised, and indicated the coping methods they employed as well as their perceived effectiveness and the sequence in which they were used. Gender differences in seven coping strategies were examined in terms of frequency of use, extent of use, relative use, and the frequency with which each method was used first in the coping sequence. The gender differences that emerged were consistent with a socialization hypothesis that predicts more problem-focused coping in men and more use of support seeking and emotion-focused coping in women. Both men and women rated problem-focused coping responses as more generally effective than seeking social support, and the latter as more effective than emotion-focused coping responses. Additionally, we explored the roles of stressor type and of threat, challenge, and control appraisals in the observed gender differences.Despite considerable theoretical and empirical attention, many gaps still remain in our understanding of the coping process and in how it is affected by demographic and individual difference variables. One question that has proven particularly difficult to answer is whether men and women cope with stress in different ways. Many studies have addressed gender differences in coping, but a consistent pattem of results is yet to emerge.
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