Sport psych final condensed EXAM GUIDE 2022
Unit 5: Stress and coping in sport and
exercise
Stress, emotion, and coping in sport and
exercise The concept of stress
• Stress response: physiological, psychological, cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions when we are
faced with heavy demands; increased HR (or decreased HR), BP, perspiration, adrenaline, and SNS arousal
• Stress: an experience produced through a person-situation relationship that is taxing or exceeding the person’s
resources; links situational demands with an individual’s reactions to the outcomes of that experience
• Stressors: external events, forces, and situations that have the potential to be interpreted as stressful; athletes
can have different stress responses to different stressors
• Lazarus: concepts of stress and emotion are similar, but emotion tells us more about a situation than stress does;
stress can be related to guilt, anxiety, or fear; the concept of stress is more simple than emotion and tells use less
about a situation
• Lazarus: 15 positive and negative core emotions in the cognitive motivational relation theme (CMRT); anger,
anxiety, fright, guilt, shame, sadness, envy, jealousy, happiness, pride, relief, hope, love, gratitude,
compassion; describes the essence of the relationship between a person and their environment
• Folkman: positive emotions play a role in stress
Stress, emotion, and appraisal
• Lazarus: primary and secondary appraisals
• Cognitive appraisal: how someone interoperates a situation
• Primary appraisal: an evaluation of what is at stake for a person in a situation
• Secondary appraisal: an evaluation of what can be done in a situation, which depends on someone’s
available resources, level of perceived control, and expectations regarding what will likely happen in the
future
• Harm/loss appraisal: an evaluation of a situation in which physiological damage has already been done and the
loss is irrevocable; student unable to play on varsity team because five years has past and they may lose their
identity
• Threat appraisal: an appraisal of a situation where an individual anticipates harm might occur or is likely to
occur; maximal weight lifting may be a threat; anxiety over the thought of losing to a rival
• Challenge appraisal: although there are obstacles in the way, they can be overcome; the mind can carry you
farther than your body can; likely to be experienced when someone has a high level of self-efficacy, perceived
control, and an approach achievement goal orientation
Types of stressors in sport contexts
• Chronic stressors: stressors that occur over a long period of time; harassment or chronic pain
• Acute stressors: stressors that occur within a short period of time; making a mistake or acute pain; can turn into
a chronic stressor
• Expected stressors: stressors that an athlete plans or prepares for; having to find transportation to a competition
venue in a busy city
• Unexpected stressors: stressors that are not anticipated and cannot be prepared for; travel delay or death
of someone
• Competitive stressors: stressors that occur prior to, during, or after competition; making a mistake
• Non-competitive stressors: stressors that are related to sport but not competition; long training session or
public scrutiny; long travel distances, dealing with the media, and not spending enough time with family and
friends
• Organizational stressors: non-competitive, environmental demands associated with the organization within which
an individual is operating; stress over financial aspects of the contract, abrasive teammates, increased training
load
• Fletcher and colleagues: five categories of organizational stressors:
o Factors intrinsic to the sport: training/competition load, travelling
o Roles in the sport organization: being team captain
o Sport relationships and interpersonal demands: lack of support and leadership
o Athletic career and performance development issues: meeting career goals, income
o The organizational structure and climate of the sport: coaching and management, media
• Holt and Hogg: four main categories of stressors:
,Sport psych final condensed EXAM GUIDE 2022
o Coaches communication: negative, punitive coach-player interaction during training and
negative, excessive feedback during the games
o Demands of international soccer: the need to adjust to the technical and tactical demands of a fast-
paced international game
o Competitive stressors: pre-game anxiety, high-expectations of going to the Olympics, making
mistakes, coming off the bench, fearing being cut from the team, and getting evaluations of their
performance
o Distractions: fatigue from practicing twice a day and opponent aggression
Neurophysiological effects of stress and emotion
• Changes as we experience emotion (good or bad): rate of respiration/breathing, heart rate and blood flow,
body temperature, skin conductance, endocrine response, cortisol and epinephrine release
• Anxiety, fear, happiness, and joy are all associated with increases in HR, respiratory rate, and skin conductance
• Stress is associated with increased vascular resistance and BP
• Cognitive appraisals of threat and challenge and threat- different cardiovascular patterns, increase HR/SV/CO
• Challenge: increase in ventricular contractility and decreases in vascular resistance, blood circulates
more efficiently
• Threat: increases in Q and vascular resistance, blood circulates less efficiently, increased BP
• Being anxious, scared, or joyful can cause muscles to narrow and tense, but some athletes can still perform well
• Robazza and Bortoli (2007): negative emotions such as anger may facilitate some athlete’s performance; anger
is associated with gross muscular peak performance
Coping
• If the person thinks that they can manage a situation, they may not experience stress and negative emotions
• How people attempt to cope with stress can affect the level and the type of stress and emotion experienced
• Coping: cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external or internal demands that are appraised
as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person; includes both thoughts and actions
• Management skills: behaviors that are routine but that still help the individual to avoid problems and help prevent
stress from happening in the first place
• Coping plays a key role of sport performance, goal attainment, and the likelihood of making it to the highest
level of sport competition
• Coping explains why athletes fluctuate from one day to another, or one moment to another
Coping strategies
• Micro-analytic approach to coping
o What coping mechanisms athletes use to cope with stress?
o Crocker and Graham assessed active coping, seeking social support, planning, denial, humor,
behavioral disengagement, venting of emotion, and suppression of competing activities
o Provides a description of the diversified coping repertoire of athletes and exercisers
o Limitation: tells us little about why athletes are using particular strategies or what goals they are trying
to accomplish via their coping efforts
• Macro-analytic approach to coping
o Why do athletes use certain coping mechanisms to cope with stress?
o Considers goals or functions of strategies used; classifies coping strategies based on their function
o Problem-focused coping: coping efforts that help people change the actual situation; seeking
information to improve performance, changing tactics to beat an opponent, etc.
o Emotional-focused coping: coping efforts to change the way a situation is attended to or interoperated,
to deal with the emotions that arise during the situation; convincing yourself that non-one care about
how you are doing in the gym
o Avoidance coping: coping efforts in which athletes attempt to remove themselves from the situation
An integrative approach
• Gaudreau and Blondin
• Task-oriented coping strategies: aimed at dealing directly with the source of stress and its resulting thoughts and
emotions; captures both problem focused and emotion-focused coping strategies; thought control, logical
analysis, effort expenditure, seeking support, relaxation, mental imagery
,Sport psych final condensed EXAM GUIDE 2022
• Distraction-oriented coping strategies: focus on internal and external stimuli that are unrelated to the
stressful situation; mental distraction, social distancing, thinking about leisure or friends
• Disengagement-oriented coping strategies: disengagement, recognition, venting of unpleasant emotions;
avoidance coping to disengage from the process of trying to make progress on a personal goal; swearing and
feeling hopeless
Emotional regulation
• James Gross
• The process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how
they experience and express these emotions
• Conscious and effortful or unconscious and automatic
• Gross’s five emotional regulation strategies:
o Situational selection: take action to increase likelihood of being in situations that will promote
emotions they would like to experience
o Situational modification: individual tries to influence a situation directly; related to Lazarus’s concept
of problem focused coping
o Attentional deployment: individual regulates emotions by directing attention toward or away from
a situation; choosing not to think about an event because it causes anxiety
o Cognitive change: changing the emotional significance of the event by changing how one thinks about
the event
o Response modulation: someone’s physiological, experiential, or behavioral responses to try and
regulate emotions; hiding or suppressing emotions
• These strategies can be used before, during, and after experiencing emotion
Effectiveness and outcomes of coping
• Some coping strategies may be more effective than others
• Perceived coping effectiveness: a decision about whether or not a coping strategy helped to deal with the
problem and/or to deal with any distress associated with the problem
o Task-oriented coping strategies are more effective compared to disengagement-oriented strategies
o Consistent with Skinner and colleagues: distinction made between good news and bad news coping
o Good news coping: organized, flexible, and constructive
o Bad news coping: rigid, disorganized, and destructive
o Using problem-focused and task-oriented coping strategies is beneficial (Gaudreau and Doron, etc.)
o Coping plays a key role in sport performance, goal attainment, and the likelihood of making it to
the highest level of sport competition
• Emotional outcomes
o Amoit and colleagues found the link between coping and emotional states:
o Problem-focused coping: emotional well-being, positive emotional states, satisfaction
o Emotion-focused and avoidance-oriented- negative emotional states
o Task-oriented coping: resulted in increased positive affect
o Disengagement-oriented coping- associated with increased negative affect
o Burnout: physical exhaustion, devaluation of one’s sport, reduced sense of accomplishment;
chronic stress or inability to manage demands; exhaustion and decreased motivation
o Raedeke and Smith (2004): coping is linked with athletic burnout, taking quiet time every day was
linked with lower levels of physical exhaustion, etc.
o Hill and colleagues (2010): problem-focused and avoidance coping were associated with lower and
higher levels of athletic burnout
o Schellenberg and colleagues (2013): task-oriented coping is associated with decreases in athletic
burnout, avoidance-coping aggravated symptoms of athletic burnout
• Physical outcomes
o Injuries can be caused by stress (distraction and anxiety)
o Rogers and Landers: attentional narrowing is how stress leads to injury; injured athletes reported more
negative life events than non-injured; athletes with greater ability to cope with stress were less likely to
be injured
, Sport psych final condensed EXAM GUIDE 2022
o Athletes with high stress and low coping are likely to be injured
o Smith and colleagues: harmful effect of negative life events on injuries can be reduced with athletes
who have good coping skills
o Coping has helped with reducing injury via reducing stress
o Johnston and Carroll: injured athletes using coping strategies at the beginning of their rehab, and this
use decreased as the rehab progressed; used both problem and emotional focused coping strategies
o Coping has helped recovery from injury; using active coping, planning, and seeking social support
o Johnston and Carroll: high levels of involvement in the sport used more support seeking as a
coping strategy to deal with injuries
Factors influencing coping
Gender
• Male and female stressors may be different
• Tamres and colleagues: different views to explain gender differences in coping
• Role constraint theory: differences in stress are the result of the different roles men and women play in society
• Self-presentation- the process why which individuals attempt to control impressions others form of
them (impression management)
• Gender socialization hypothesis: males and females learn to use different coping strategies to manage the same
types of situations; sex-role stereotyping and role expectations- females more than males are encouraged to
express their emotions and turn to others for emotional support
• Different stressors and appraisals can influence coping strategies
• Gender dispositional hypothesis: gender differences will be present when males and females are presented
with the same stressors and have similar appraisals
Culture
• Impacts stress, coping, and emotion process
• Culture influences what events are important in sport and success/failure
• Hoedaya and Anshel: differences in stress intensity and ways of coping in Indonesia and Australian athletes
• There is limited research examining cultural influences on stress and coping in sport
• Cross-cultural comparisons of stress and coping have shown differences between athletes’ stressor appraisals and
coping during competition
• Prayer is an important part of culture that can influence stress and coping
Individual factors
• Age, development, and expertise
• Personality: act and feel in a stable manner, factor of how someone reacts under stress
o Optimism: belief that good things will happen in the future
o Grove and Heard: trait self confidence and optimism were positively associated with usage of
problem- focused coping and less of emotional-focus coping
o Gaudreau and Blondin: optimistic athletes more likely to attain performance goals and experience
subjective well-being following a competition; task-oriented coping; using increased effort,
mental imagery, and relaxation
o Self-oriented, perfectionist athlete’s athletes use task-oriented coping, which causes goal-attainment
and increased life-satisfaction
• Cognitive appraisal of emotion: perceiving a situation as a challenge using task-oriented coping, perceiving
a situation as a threat using avoidance-oriented coping
o Trait anxiety: anxious, worried, preoccupied; use disengagement-oriented coping, self-blame, denial, etc.
o Perceiving anxiety as facilitative leads to more problem-oriented coping and less disengagement-
oriented coping
Social environmental factors
• Coaching and teammate interactions influence athlete’s emotions and coping
• Emotions can be contagious within a team, positive or negative
• Tamminen and Crocker: high level athletes aware of the effect of their emotions on their teammates,
therefore they regulate their emotions
• Coaches pre-game and intermission speeches affect emotion
Unit 5: Stress and coping in sport and
exercise
Stress, emotion, and coping in sport and
exercise The concept of stress
• Stress response: physiological, psychological, cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions when we are
faced with heavy demands; increased HR (or decreased HR), BP, perspiration, adrenaline, and SNS arousal
• Stress: an experience produced through a person-situation relationship that is taxing or exceeding the person’s
resources; links situational demands with an individual’s reactions to the outcomes of that experience
• Stressors: external events, forces, and situations that have the potential to be interpreted as stressful; athletes
can have different stress responses to different stressors
• Lazarus: concepts of stress and emotion are similar, but emotion tells us more about a situation than stress does;
stress can be related to guilt, anxiety, or fear; the concept of stress is more simple than emotion and tells use less
about a situation
• Lazarus: 15 positive and negative core emotions in the cognitive motivational relation theme (CMRT); anger,
anxiety, fright, guilt, shame, sadness, envy, jealousy, happiness, pride, relief, hope, love, gratitude,
compassion; describes the essence of the relationship between a person and their environment
• Folkman: positive emotions play a role in stress
Stress, emotion, and appraisal
• Lazarus: primary and secondary appraisals
• Cognitive appraisal: how someone interoperates a situation
• Primary appraisal: an evaluation of what is at stake for a person in a situation
• Secondary appraisal: an evaluation of what can be done in a situation, which depends on someone’s
available resources, level of perceived control, and expectations regarding what will likely happen in the
future
• Harm/loss appraisal: an evaluation of a situation in which physiological damage has already been done and the
loss is irrevocable; student unable to play on varsity team because five years has past and they may lose their
identity
• Threat appraisal: an appraisal of a situation where an individual anticipates harm might occur or is likely to
occur; maximal weight lifting may be a threat; anxiety over the thought of losing to a rival
• Challenge appraisal: although there are obstacles in the way, they can be overcome; the mind can carry you
farther than your body can; likely to be experienced when someone has a high level of self-efficacy, perceived
control, and an approach achievement goal orientation
Types of stressors in sport contexts
• Chronic stressors: stressors that occur over a long period of time; harassment or chronic pain
• Acute stressors: stressors that occur within a short period of time; making a mistake or acute pain; can turn into
a chronic stressor
• Expected stressors: stressors that an athlete plans or prepares for; having to find transportation to a competition
venue in a busy city
• Unexpected stressors: stressors that are not anticipated and cannot be prepared for; travel delay or death
of someone
• Competitive stressors: stressors that occur prior to, during, or after competition; making a mistake
• Non-competitive stressors: stressors that are related to sport but not competition; long training session or
public scrutiny; long travel distances, dealing with the media, and not spending enough time with family and
friends
• Organizational stressors: non-competitive, environmental demands associated with the organization within which
an individual is operating; stress over financial aspects of the contract, abrasive teammates, increased training
load
• Fletcher and colleagues: five categories of organizational stressors:
o Factors intrinsic to the sport: training/competition load, travelling
o Roles in the sport organization: being team captain
o Sport relationships and interpersonal demands: lack of support and leadership
o Athletic career and performance development issues: meeting career goals, income
o The organizational structure and climate of the sport: coaching and management, media
• Holt and Hogg: four main categories of stressors:
,Sport psych final condensed EXAM GUIDE 2022
o Coaches communication: negative, punitive coach-player interaction during training and
negative, excessive feedback during the games
o Demands of international soccer: the need to adjust to the technical and tactical demands of a fast-
paced international game
o Competitive stressors: pre-game anxiety, high-expectations of going to the Olympics, making
mistakes, coming off the bench, fearing being cut from the team, and getting evaluations of their
performance
o Distractions: fatigue from practicing twice a day and opponent aggression
Neurophysiological effects of stress and emotion
• Changes as we experience emotion (good or bad): rate of respiration/breathing, heart rate and blood flow,
body temperature, skin conductance, endocrine response, cortisol and epinephrine release
• Anxiety, fear, happiness, and joy are all associated with increases in HR, respiratory rate, and skin conductance
• Stress is associated with increased vascular resistance and BP
• Cognitive appraisals of threat and challenge and threat- different cardiovascular patterns, increase HR/SV/CO
• Challenge: increase in ventricular contractility and decreases in vascular resistance, blood circulates
more efficiently
• Threat: increases in Q and vascular resistance, blood circulates less efficiently, increased BP
• Being anxious, scared, or joyful can cause muscles to narrow and tense, but some athletes can still perform well
• Robazza and Bortoli (2007): negative emotions such as anger may facilitate some athlete’s performance; anger
is associated with gross muscular peak performance
Coping
• If the person thinks that they can manage a situation, they may not experience stress and negative emotions
• How people attempt to cope with stress can affect the level and the type of stress and emotion experienced
• Coping: cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external or internal demands that are appraised
as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person; includes both thoughts and actions
• Management skills: behaviors that are routine but that still help the individual to avoid problems and help prevent
stress from happening in the first place
• Coping plays a key role of sport performance, goal attainment, and the likelihood of making it to the highest
level of sport competition
• Coping explains why athletes fluctuate from one day to another, or one moment to another
Coping strategies
• Micro-analytic approach to coping
o What coping mechanisms athletes use to cope with stress?
o Crocker and Graham assessed active coping, seeking social support, planning, denial, humor,
behavioral disengagement, venting of emotion, and suppression of competing activities
o Provides a description of the diversified coping repertoire of athletes and exercisers
o Limitation: tells us little about why athletes are using particular strategies or what goals they are trying
to accomplish via their coping efforts
• Macro-analytic approach to coping
o Why do athletes use certain coping mechanisms to cope with stress?
o Considers goals or functions of strategies used; classifies coping strategies based on their function
o Problem-focused coping: coping efforts that help people change the actual situation; seeking
information to improve performance, changing tactics to beat an opponent, etc.
o Emotional-focused coping: coping efforts to change the way a situation is attended to or interoperated,
to deal with the emotions that arise during the situation; convincing yourself that non-one care about
how you are doing in the gym
o Avoidance coping: coping efforts in which athletes attempt to remove themselves from the situation
An integrative approach
• Gaudreau and Blondin
• Task-oriented coping strategies: aimed at dealing directly with the source of stress and its resulting thoughts and
emotions; captures both problem focused and emotion-focused coping strategies; thought control, logical
analysis, effort expenditure, seeking support, relaxation, mental imagery
,Sport psych final condensed EXAM GUIDE 2022
• Distraction-oriented coping strategies: focus on internal and external stimuli that are unrelated to the
stressful situation; mental distraction, social distancing, thinking about leisure or friends
• Disengagement-oriented coping strategies: disengagement, recognition, venting of unpleasant emotions;
avoidance coping to disengage from the process of trying to make progress on a personal goal; swearing and
feeling hopeless
Emotional regulation
• James Gross
• The process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how
they experience and express these emotions
• Conscious and effortful or unconscious and automatic
• Gross’s five emotional regulation strategies:
o Situational selection: take action to increase likelihood of being in situations that will promote
emotions they would like to experience
o Situational modification: individual tries to influence a situation directly; related to Lazarus’s concept
of problem focused coping
o Attentional deployment: individual regulates emotions by directing attention toward or away from
a situation; choosing not to think about an event because it causes anxiety
o Cognitive change: changing the emotional significance of the event by changing how one thinks about
the event
o Response modulation: someone’s physiological, experiential, or behavioral responses to try and
regulate emotions; hiding or suppressing emotions
• These strategies can be used before, during, and after experiencing emotion
Effectiveness and outcomes of coping
• Some coping strategies may be more effective than others
• Perceived coping effectiveness: a decision about whether or not a coping strategy helped to deal with the
problem and/or to deal with any distress associated with the problem
o Task-oriented coping strategies are more effective compared to disengagement-oriented strategies
o Consistent with Skinner and colleagues: distinction made between good news and bad news coping
o Good news coping: organized, flexible, and constructive
o Bad news coping: rigid, disorganized, and destructive
o Using problem-focused and task-oriented coping strategies is beneficial (Gaudreau and Doron, etc.)
o Coping plays a key role in sport performance, goal attainment, and the likelihood of making it to
the highest level of sport competition
• Emotional outcomes
o Amoit and colleagues found the link between coping and emotional states:
o Problem-focused coping: emotional well-being, positive emotional states, satisfaction
o Emotion-focused and avoidance-oriented- negative emotional states
o Task-oriented coping: resulted in increased positive affect
o Disengagement-oriented coping- associated with increased negative affect
o Burnout: physical exhaustion, devaluation of one’s sport, reduced sense of accomplishment;
chronic stress or inability to manage demands; exhaustion and decreased motivation
o Raedeke and Smith (2004): coping is linked with athletic burnout, taking quiet time every day was
linked with lower levels of physical exhaustion, etc.
o Hill and colleagues (2010): problem-focused and avoidance coping were associated with lower and
higher levels of athletic burnout
o Schellenberg and colleagues (2013): task-oriented coping is associated with decreases in athletic
burnout, avoidance-coping aggravated symptoms of athletic burnout
• Physical outcomes
o Injuries can be caused by stress (distraction and anxiety)
o Rogers and Landers: attentional narrowing is how stress leads to injury; injured athletes reported more
negative life events than non-injured; athletes with greater ability to cope with stress were less likely to
be injured
, Sport psych final condensed EXAM GUIDE 2022
o Athletes with high stress and low coping are likely to be injured
o Smith and colleagues: harmful effect of negative life events on injuries can be reduced with athletes
who have good coping skills
o Coping has helped with reducing injury via reducing stress
o Johnston and Carroll: injured athletes using coping strategies at the beginning of their rehab, and this
use decreased as the rehab progressed; used both problem and emotional focused coping strategies
o Coping has helped recovery from injury; using active coping, planning, and seeking social support
o Johnston and Carroll: high levels of involvement in the sport used more support seeking as a
coping strategy to deal with injuries
Factors influencing coping
Gender
• Male and female stressors may be different
• Tamres and colleagues: different views to explain gender differences in coping
• Role constraint theory: differences in stress are the result of the different roles men and women play in society
• Self-presentation- the process why which individuals attempt to control impressions others form of
them (impression management)
• Gender socialization hypothesis: males and females learn to use different coping strategies to manage the same
types of situations; sex-role stereotyping and role expectations- females more than males are encouraged to
express their emotions and turn to others for emotional support
• Different stressors and appraisals can influence coping strategies
• Gender dispositional hypothesis: gender differences will be present when males and females are presented
with the same stressors and have similar appraisals
Culture
• Impacts stress, coping, and emotion process
• Culture influences what events are important in sport and success/failure
• Hoedaya and Anshel: differences in stress intensity and ways of coping in Indonesia and Australian athletes
• There is limited research examining cultural influences on stress and coping in sport
• Cross-cultural comparisons of stress and coping have shown differences between athletes’ stressor appraisals and
coping during competition
• Prayer is an important part of culture that can influence stress and coping
Individual factors
• Age, development, and expertise
• Personality: act and feel in a stable manner, factor of how someone reacts under stress
o Optimism: belief that good things will happen in the future
o Grove and Heard: trait self confidence and optimism were positively associated with usage of
problem- focused coping and less of emotional-focus coping
o Gaudreau and Blondin: optimistic athletes more likely to attain performance goals and experience
subjective well-being following a competition; task-oriented coping; using increased effort,
mental imagery, and relaxation
o Self-oriented, perfectionist athlete’s athletes use task-oriented coping, which causes goal-attainment
and increased life-satisfaction
• Cognitive appraisal of emotion: perceiving a situation as a challenge using task-oriented coping, perceiving
a situation as a threat using avoidance-oriented coping
o Trait anxiety: anxious, worried, preoccupied; use disengagement-oriented coping, self-blame, denial, etc.
o Perceiving anxiety as facilitative leads to more problem-oriented coping and less disengagement-
oriented coping
Social environmental factors
• Coaching and teammate interactions influence athlete’s emotions and coping
• Emotions can be contagious within a team, positive or negative
• Tamminen and Crocker: high level athletes aware of the effect of their emotions on their teammates,
therefore they regulate their emotions
• Coaches pre-game and intermission speeches affect emotion
