Study: Adversarial Growth in Olympic Swimmers: Constructive Reality or Illusory Self-Deception?

Abstract: Efforts to regulate emotions can influence others, and interpersonal emotion regulation within teams may affect athletes' own affective and motivational outcomes. We examined adolescent athletes' (N = 451, Nteams = 38) self- and interpersonal emotion regulation, as well as associations with peer climate, sport enjoyment, and sport commitment within a multilevel model of emotion regulation in teams. Results of multilevel Bayesian structural equation modeling showed that athletes' self-worsening emotion regulation strategies were negatively associated with enjoyment, while other-improving emotion regulation strategies were positively associated enjoyment and commitment. The team-level interpersonal emotion regulation climate and peer motivational climates were also associated with enjoyment and commitment. Team-level factors moderated some of the relationships between athletes' emotion regulation with enjoyment and commitment. These findings extend previous research by examining interpersonal emotion regulation within teams using a multilevel approach, and they demonstrate the importance of person- and team-level factors for athletes' enjoyment and commitment.

Author: Karen Howells

Karen is a Lecturer in Sport and Fitness at The Open University. Previously she worked as a lecturer in psychology and sport psychology in a number of face-to-face universities and further and higher education colleges.  Karen joined the Open University in 2015 having completed her PhD at Loughbrough University. The title of her PhD thesis was 'A Qualitative Exploration of Adversarial Growth in Elite Swimmers'. Karen's research arising from her doctorate has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and presented at national and international conferences.

Karen's specialist area is sport and performance psychology. She is a Chartered Sport Psychologist with the British Psychological Society (BPS) and is registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).  She regularly provides sport and performance psychology support to athletes from a wide range of individual and team sports competing at a variety of levels.  She has also delivered non-technical skills to teams within the Oil and Gas Industry and is an ex-Royal Air Force Officer.

 

Links:

 

Author: http://www.open.ac.uk/people/klh536

 

Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27392387

 

Quotes:

 

"Post traumatic growth occurs when an individual is shattered by their experiences, but in their recovery go beyond their pre-trauma functioning"

 

"I am not sure the growth is real (post traumatic). If feels to me like people are talking about growth, when actually there is nothing there."

 

"Real growth has some kind of change in outlook on life, a philosophical change, real fundamental differences in how people view life."

 

"The illusory side of growth is more about self-deception; People deceiving themselves into thinking something positive has come from their experiences."

 

"These individuals are identifying positive outcomes, but they are not real."

 

"Ideally, I'd like to say we can grow from our experiences, but that's not to say we always grow, or we have to grow."

 

"Resiliency and growth in some ways are contradictory."