Athletes' Regulation of Emotions Experienced During Competition: A Naturalistic Video-Assisted Study

This study aimed to identify the type and effectiveness of emotional regulation strategies used by table tennis players to manage their emotions experienced during competition. Using a naturalistic video-assisted approach, 30 interviews were conducted with 11 national table tennis players. Ten emotions were identified in the participants’ transcriptions: anger, anxiety, discouragement, disappointment, disgust, joy, serenity, relief, hope, and pride. Qualitative analyses of participants’ transcriptions revealed the emergence of 4 categories pertaining to emotion regulation: (a) regulation efforts comprising: (i) antecedent-focused regulation (e.g., attention deployment, cognitive change); (ii) response-focused regulation (e.g., behavioral regulation, physiological regulation); and (iii) social support; (b) automatic regulation; (c) no regulation; and (d) regulation effectiveness. Quantitative analyses of participants’ transcriptions revealed that: (a) attention deployment strategies emerged as the emotional regulation strategies the most used by participants; (b) some strategies were preferentially used to manage particular emotions during competition (e.g., physiological regulation strategies were essentially used to manage anxiety); (c) automaticity of emotion regulation was strongly associated with a high perceived effectiveness; (d) automatic strategies were associated with specific emotions such as joy, relief, or anger; (e) positive emotions were almost always managed well; (f) a large variability in the emotional regulation effectiveness of negative emotions appeared; disgust, discouragement, and anxiety being the emotions the least efficaciously regulated; and (g) athletes who rated selected emotional regulation strategies as effective really performed well and those who rated selected emotional regulation strategies as ineffective really failed to perform up to their potential.