| Description |
Resilience is distinguised by positive adaptation following adversity. All athletes inevitably experience adversity in sport, often in the guise of failure. Positive adaptation following failure is a highly desirable pattern of behavior in sport, yet little is known about the key markers of positive adaptation. Three theorized charactersitics of positive adaptation from the literature are low cortisol levels, positive emotional responses, and good performances. With these characteristics in mind, the purpose of this psychophysiological study was to investigate cortisol, emotional, and performance differences following failure in more and less resilient athletes. To identify high and low resilient athletes for study, 116 male and female collegiate lacrosse players were initially recruited to self-assess their resilience. The intial survey pool was split into three groups using a mean +/- one standard deviation split from the resilience measure. High resilient athletes scored at or above the 84.1th percentile (n= 18), low resilient qualities athletes scored at or below the 15.9th percentile (n= 18), and the control group (n= 17) scored at or around the mean. The task was a new lacrosse task where all participants except the control group were given failure feedback. All participants gave baseline, prefailure, and postfailure measures of positive and negative affect, pride and shame, and cortisol. Performance data on the task was collected on trial one and two of the task. Data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVAs to examine participants' responses to failure. There were no significant group by time interactions from prefailure to postfailure on cortisol, emotion, or performance. There were significant main effects for time, indicating that irregardless of resilience, all participants reacted similarly to failure. In addition, two exploratory analyses examined group differences from baseline to prefailure and a small subset of participants (n= 15), who received an additional condition where success feedback was given to examine group differences from presuccess to postsuccess. There was a significant group by time interaction for negative affect from baseline to prefailure. High resilient and control groups decreased in negative affect whereas the low resilient group increased. There were no significant findings regarding responses to success. |
