Emotion Regulation

Abstract

How do athletes feel when they perform at their best? How can they reach and maintain optimal feeling states? How do athletes feel when they perform poorly? How can they avoid or regulate their dysfunctional feelings? How can they optimize their performance? These are critical questions for athletes, coaches, and practitioners that have also attracted the attention of researchers. Indeed, athletes’ ability to regulate their emotional states is crucial for a successful performance. For decades, researchers have examined the relationships between emotions and performance (Hanin, 2000; Jones, Lane, Bray, Uphill, & Catlin, 2005; Lane et al., 2016; Ruiz, Raglin, & Hanin, 2017; Turner & Jones, 2018). Anxiety, as the most common emotion that athletes experience prior to competition, was the focus of initial research, which aimed at understanding how such emotion could influence performance (Hackfort & Schwenkmezger, 1993; Hanton, Mellalieu, & Williams, 2015; Marchant, Maher, & Wang, 2014; Turner & Jones, 2018). Beyond anxiety, however, athletes experience an array of emotions, which can be functional or dysfunctional for their performance. There is, therefore, a need for a more holistic approach to the study of a variety of unpleasant and pleasant emotions and other non-emotion components of athletes’ experiences, which form the so-called psychobiosocial states. Because of the acknowledged impact of emotions on performance, emotion regulation strategies have attracted research attention in recent years (Friesen et al., 2013; Lane, Beedie, Jones, Uphill, & Devonport, 2012). Although emotion-centred strategies are useful to improve performance, a combination of strategies focused on emotional states as well as action or task-execution patterns are deemed most effective (Bortoli, Bertollo, Hanin, & Robazza, 2012; Robazza, Bertollo, Filho, Hanin, & Bortoli, 2016).