Self-Compassion, Psychological Flexibility, Hardiness, and a Hint of Harmonious Passion: The Recipe for Building Athletes Adaptable to the Stress of Sport Related Injury

Abstract

Due to the recognition that sport related injury be approached from a biopsychosocial perspective, there has been a push for deeper psychological exploration in research. This has led to interest in two main areas: 1) identifying the psychological variables that may play a role in making an athlete more prone to injury, and 2) an athlete’s emotional, cognitive, and behavioural response to injury and how they influence the rehabilitation process (Almeida et al., 2014). As a result, the study presented in this dissertation explored the psychological factors believed to be important to athlete health. Using path analysis, two path models were presented and tested. The first model depicts the interaction between harmonious passion, self-compassion, psychological flexibility, hardiness, and perceived stress. The second, demonstrates the relationship between these variables when harmonious passion is replaced with obsessive passion and psychological flexibility is replaced with psychological rigidity. Multigroup invariance testing was then conducted in order to investigate possible variance between these psychological factors when athletes were separated into injured and non-injured groups. Two hundred and sixty-three athletes were included in this study and more than half of the athletes identified that they had experienced a sport related injury in the past year (n = 137, 52%). The results of the path analysis indicate that multiple psychological factors impact athlete perceptions of stress. Models met criteria for acceptable fit on all goodness-of-fit indices. However, the results of multigroup path analysis indicated that there were no differences in the relationships between psychological factors when athletes were separated into injured and non-injured groups.