Emotion regulation among competitive youth athletes: exploring the independent and interactive effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression

ABSTRACT

Emotion regulation is important for individual well-being and performance across sport and non-sport contexts. However, studies focusing specifically on youth athletes’ emotion regulation are comparatively rare. This study examined how youth athletes’ engagement in two common emotion regulation strategies, namely cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, related to key outcomes including pleasant and unpleasant emotions felt, enjoyment, intentions to return, confidence, satisfaction, and emotional and social loneliness. Prior to the main analyses, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test the factorial validity of the responses obtained with the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents [ERQ-CA; Gullone & Taffe, 2012. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA): A psychometric evaluation. Psychological Assessment, 24(2), 409–417] that was adapted to youth sport contexts. A cross-sectional online survey was administered with 448 youth athletes (M_age= 15.1 years old, SD = 2.3) in competitive sports. Confirmatory factor analyses showed suboptimal factor loadings for three items, and they were thus removed from subsequent analyses. Polynomial regressions with response surface analyses were used to explore the independent effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on the outcome variables, as well as their interactive effects on these outcomes. The results showed that more favourable levels of outcome variables were associated with greater use of cognitive reappraisal and less use of expressive suppression. The results demonstrate the benefits of cognitive reappraisal and the detriments of expressive suppression for youth athletes, and provide evidence for the usefulness of the adapted version of the ERQ-CA in youth sport contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Coping
• polynomial regression
• response surface analysis
• youth sport
• factor analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Rachel Dunn, Sara Sutherland, and Selena Lin for their assistance with recruitment.

Data availability statement

The anonymized data that support the findings of this study are openly available at: https://osf.io/5kxg8/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term youth generally refers to individuals between childhood and adulthood, and previous researchers have used this term to describe young individuals belonging to various age classifications. In this study, the term youth is used to describe individuals who are between ages of 10 and 18.

2 To add protection from automated bots completing the survey, the survey had the Google reCAPTCHA feature enabled. Further, the social media post did not include the online link publicly. Rather, these posts provided an online link that parents had to click to access the parent information letter on the web. This link was also protected by the Google reCAPTCHA feature, providing two layers of safeguarding.

3 The two independent variables in our study represented two distinct forms of emotion regulation, and thus they were not nominally equivalent (i.e., the two predictors were not measuring the same latent construct). Hence, we used Schönbrodt’s (2016) approach to assess various possible fit patterns between the two independent variables. Please see Schönbrodt (2016) for more detailed discussions.

4 Analyses examining gender differences included individuals who identified as either male (N = 244) or female (N = 178), and did not include the individuals who identified as non-binary due to the small number (N = 2).

5 Prior to analysis, missing responses were explored. Among the 448 participants who responded to the 10 emotion regulation items, the number of missing responses ranged from one (0.2%) to seven (1.6%). Among the 436 participants who filled out the 22 emotion items, the number of missing responses ranged from zero to four (0.9%). Among the 429 participants who responded to the four enjoyment items and four intentions to return items, the number of missing responses ranged from zero to five (1.2%). Among the 426 participants who responded to the items assessing satisfaction and loneliness, the number of missing responses ranged from one (0.2%) to six (1.4%).

6 The item contributing to the poor reliability read, “I miss having people around”, whereas the other two items read, “I experience a general sense of emptiness” and “I often feel rejected.” The participants scored much higher on the problematic item, which caused the poor reliability. This appears to be attributable to the fact that data collection occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many sport programmes were cancelled for the season.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 756-2020-0185].