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Abstract

Competitive anxiety is related to athletes' performance. Due to this, it is important to maintain it on an optimal level. While anxiety has a well-studied gender difference that is related to the opposite patterns of activity in left parietal and temporal lobes, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and occipital gyrus, gender differences in competitive anxiety and its factors are not fully investigated. Exploratory research of competitive anxiety and coping strategies in Ukrainian junior handball national team was conducted. Participants of the study are 35 adolescences with mean age 15.63 and standard deviation equal to 0.49. 13 participants were male, while 22 participants were female. Participants completed Ways of Coping Questionnaire, which was developed by Folkman & Lazarus in 1988 and adopted byBityutskaya in 2015, and Sport Competition Anxiety Test, which was developed by Martens in 1977 and adopted by Hanin in 1982. Female athletes have significantly higher scores on both Competitive Anxiety and Accepting Responsibility scale with p=0.007 and p=0.006 respectively. Cohen's d was 0.47 for both tests. Spearman correlation test revealed moderate correlation r = 0.39 with p = 0.02 for the whole sample. Thus, accepting responsibility coping strategy is associated with increased competition anxiety in Ukrainian athletes. Both accepting responsibility coping and competitive anxiety level is gender biased.

Mental skills in Serbian handball players: In relation to the position and gender of players

“…Regarding gender differences in the mental skills of handball players, the obtained results indicate that female handball players show a lower degree of anxiety regulation ability than 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.960201 male handball players but, on the other hand, show a higher degree of relaxation ability. The obtained results are in line with previous research, which found that female handball players have a somewhat lower ability to regulate emotions and less coping strategies compared to male handball players (Kristjánsdóttir et al, 2018;Ivaskevych et al, 2019;Ökrös et al, 2020). Although the results on gender differences in mental skills are inconsistent, what can be noticed is those female handball players have a higher degree of emotional arousal, which does not have to be a consequence of personality traits, but the situation itself, and that aspects of competitive anxiety and performance concerns are more present with them than with male handball players.…”

“…Some studies have found that female football players react and perceive more intense stress and that they experience less control in stressful situations (Kaiseler et al, 2012). Similarly, in the sample of junior female handball players of the Ukrainian national team, the result shows that female handball players achieve higher scores on competitive anxiety and are more prone to selfblame compared to male handball players (Ivaskevych et al, 2019). In the sample of the junior Hungarian handball team, the authors found that male handball players achieved significantly higher scores on Coping with Adversity and Freedom from worry, while female handball players scored higher scores on Goal Setting/Mental Preparation and Coachability (Ökrös et al, 2020).…”

Correlation Between Indicators of Balance of Nervous Processes With Localization of Control in High Skilled Women Handball Players

“…Handball is a situational sport with a pronounced risk of injury, which requires a high level of strength and mobility of nervous processes, the resistance of the central nervous system to interference in conditions of significant nervous and emotional tension, control and self-control [20,18,19].…”