Collegiate Athletes’ Cognitive Beliefs Related to Setback Anxiety and Rumination in Sport

ABSTRACT

Setbacks are common occurrences in sport. Recently, setbacks such as injuries and deselection have been accompanied, and confounded, by setbacks related to COVID-19. How students manage a setback may depend on the interaction of two control beliefs: primary control (PC) to directly influence the setback and secondary control (SC) to adjust to it. Purpose: This study investigates the relationships between athletes’ PC and SC and two important sport setback-related outcomes—anxiety and rumination. Method: We employed a cross-sectional design examining collegiate athletes in the USA and Canada (N = 200; M_age = 20.9 years, 143 women, 52 men, 3 non-binary, 2 did not disclose). Using regression tests controlling for setback severity, we examined the interaction effects of athletes’ PC and SC beliefs relative to setbacks, on the anxiety and rumination variables. Results: We found SC beliefs were beneficial to setback-related anxiety and rumination. A significant interaction indicated that particularly when PC was low, SC had negative associations with setback-related anxieties about letting others down (β = –.45, p < .001) and experiencing pain (β = –.37, p < .001). Conclusion: The findings suggest SC beliefs are important for managing setbacks—specifically for attenuating harmful rumination, and specific setback anxieties. We discuss the possibility of enhancing SC beliefs for combatting sport setbacks through control-enhancing interventions as a direction for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Competitive athletes
• perceived control
• primary control
• psychosocial wellbeing
• secondary control

Disclosure statement

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

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Alberta’s Research Ethics Board 2 [Pro00113177].

Notes

¹ For this study we considered collegiate athletes who indicated they were competing at the postsecondary university or college level in Canada and the USA.

² For all main analyses, the range of missing data was 0–6% of missing cases across all study variables and regression analyses (e.g., 11 out of 200 cases missing for the regression analyses examining setback-related anxiety about being perceived weak).

³ The regression analyses were also tested when controlling for level of setback severity. The findings revealed consistent main and interaction effects with the exception of SC no longer being significantly associated with setback-related anxiety for losing ability and self-esteem—likely due to the competing variance explained by the setback severity covariate (βs = .25, .33 respectively).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a SSHRCC IDG grant awarded to the authors [430-2021-00208].