Michel-Kröhler Alena, Kaurin Aleksandra, Heil Lutz Felix, Berti Stefan
Department of Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, Institute for Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 8;11:572030. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.572030. eCollection 2020.
Self-regulation, especially the regulation of emotion, is an important component of athletic performance. In our study, we tested the effect of a self-distancing strategy on athletes' performance in an aggression-inducing experimental task in the laboratory. To this end, we modified an established paradigm of interpersonal provocation [Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP)], which has the potential to complement field studies in order to increase our understanding of effective emotion regulation of athletes in critical situations in competitions. In our experimental setting, we first tested the applicability of the self-distancing perspective and the athletes' ability to dynamically adapt besides the self-distanced perspective a self-immersed perspective to provocation in the TAP. Secondly, we investigated how this altered perspective modulated regulatory abilities of negative affectivity, anger, and aggression. The experiment consisted of two conditions in which the participant adopted either a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective. Forty athletes (female: 23; male: 17) from different team ( = 27) and individual sports ( = 13) with a mean age of 23.83 years ( = 3.41) competed individually in a reaction-time task against a (fictitious) opponent. Results show that athletes are equally able to adopt both perspectives. In addition, within-person analyses indicate that self-distancing decreased aggressive behavior and negative affect compared to the self-immersed perspective. Our results suggest that self-distancing modulates different levels of athletes' experience (i.e., affect and anger) and behavior. Furthermore, this demonstrates the feasibility of testing self-regulation of emotion in athletes in a laboratory setting and allows for further application in research in sports and exercise psychology.
自我调节，尤其是情绪调节，是运动表现的一个重要组成部分。在我们的研究中，我们在实验室的一项诱发攻击行为的实验任务中测试了自我疏离策略对运动员表现的影响。为此，我们修改了一种既定的人际挑衅范式[泰勒攻击范式（TAP）]，它有可能补充实地研究，以增进我们对运动员在比赛关键情况下有效情绪调节的理解。在我们的实验环境中，我们首先测试了自我疏离视角的适用性以及运动员在TAP中除了自我疏离视角之外动态适应自我沉浸视角以应对挑衅的能力。其次，我们研究了这种改变的视角如何调节负面情感、愤怒和攻击的调节能力。实验包括两个条件，参与者在其中采用自我沉浸或自我疏离视角。40名来自不同团队运动（n = 27）和个人运动（n = 13）的运动员，平均年龄为23.83岁（标准差 = 3.41），在一项反应时任务中与一名（虚构的）对手单独竞争。结果表明，运动员同样能够采用这两种视角。此外，个体内分析表明，与自我沉浸视角相比，自我疏离减少了攻击行为和负面情绪。我们的结果表明，自我疏离调节了运动员不同层面的体验（即情感和愤怒）以及行为。此外，这证明了在实验室环境中测试运动员情绪自我调节的可行性，并允许在运动和运动心理学研究中进一步应用。
