Emotional Self-Regulation in Sport and Performance

Abstract

Emotions are multifaceted subjective feelings that reflect expected, current, or past interactions with the environment. They involve sets of interrelated psychological processes, encompassing affective, cognitive, motivational, physiological, and expressive or behavioral components. Emotions play a fundamental role in human adaptation and performance by improving sensory intake, detection of relevant stimuli, readiness for behavioral responses, decision-making, memory, and interpersonal interactions. These beneficial effects enhance human health and performance in any endeavor, including sport, work, and the arts. However, emotions can also be maladaptive. Their beneficial or maladaptive effects depend on their content, time of occurrence, and intensity level. Emotional self-regulation refers to the processes by which individuals modify the type, quality, time course, and intensity of their emotions. Individuals attempt to regulate their emotions to attain beneficial effects, to deal with unfavorable circumstances, or both. Emotional self-regulation occurs when persons monitor the emotions they are experiencing and try to modify or maintain them. It can be automatic or effortful, conscious or unconscious. The process model of emotion regulation provides a framework for the classification of antecedent- and response-focused regulation processes. These processes are categorized according to the point at which they have their primary impact in the emotion generative process: situation selection (e.g., confrontation and avoidance), situation modification (e.g., direct situation modification, support-seeking, and conflict resolution), attentional deployment (e.g., distraction, concentration, and mindfulness), cognitive change (e.g., self-efficacy appraisals, challenge/threat appraisals, positive reappraisal, and acceptance), and response modulation (e.g., regulation of experience, arousal regulation, and expressive suppression). In addition to the process model of emotion regulation, other prominent approaches provide useful insights to the study of adaptation and self-regulation for performance enhancement. These include the strength model of self-control, the dual-process theories, the biopsychosocial model, the attentional control theory, and the individual zones of optimal functioning model. Based on the latter model, emotion-centered and action-centered interrelated strategies have been proposed for self-regulation in sport. Within this framework, performers identify, regulate, and optimize their functional and dysfunctional emotions and their most relevant components of functional performance patterns.

Initial Validation of the Psychobiosocial States in Physical Education (PBS-SPE) Scale

“…The affective modality can be perceived as pleasant or unpleasant (hedonic tone) and to have a functional or dysfunctional impact on performance, whereas all other non-emotion-related modalities can be perceived as functional or dysfunctional. Research findings uphold this conceptualization (for reviews, see Ruiz et al, 2017; Robazza and Ruiz, 2018).…”

Coach-Created Motivational Climate and Athletes’ Adaptation to Psychological Stress: Temporal Motivation-Emotion Interplay

“…This categorization results in a range of pleasant and unpleasant, functional and dysfunctional emotional experiences. Extensive empirical evidence supports this conceptualization (for reviews, see Ruiz et al, 2017b; Robazza and Ruiz, 2018). Most IZOF-based research, however, has focused on the emotion-performance relationship disregarding the study of the antecedents of emotional states.…”

Action Monitoring Through External or Internal Focus of Attention Does Not Impair Endurance Performance

“…The MAP model conceptualization of different states associated with optimal performance is akin to other theoretical views (for a review, see Robazza and Ruiz, 2018 ). For example, the default-interventionist framework ( Evans and Stanovich, 2013 ), within the dual-process theories, maintains that human behavior is governed by both automatic and controlled modes of processing (see Furley et al, 2015 ; Furley and Wood, 2016 ).…”

“…To avoid excessive burden on the participants, dysfunctional attention toward the control of action or unrelated tasks was not included. Future studies may consider manipulating attention to ensure that participants experience all four performance states as conceptualized in the MAP model ( Bortoli et al, 2012 ; Robazza et al, 2016 ) or related multiple states (MuSt; Robazza and Ruiz, 2018 ) perspectives. Finally, other limitations are that the investigation was conducted in the laboratory and that the cognitive effort induced using the contextual interference paradigm may not have been high.…”

“…The contention that an internal focus of attention is not always associated with detrimental effects and that can even benefit performance is also endorsed by action and motor-centered frameworks ( Hanin and Hanina, 2009 ; Carson and Collins, 2016 ; Hanin et al, 2016 ; for a review, see Robazza and Ruiz, 2018 ). The multi-action plan (MAP) model, in particular, has been proposed to account for the multiple performance states of athletes, and to help them reach and maintain high execution standards in training and competition ( Bortoli et al, 2012 ; Robazza et al, 2016 ).…”