Can we speak of a negative psychological tetrad in sports? A probabilistic Bayesian study on competitive sailing

Alejandro García-Mas; Bruno Martins; Antonio Núñez; Francisco J Ponseti; Rubén Trigueros; Antonio Alias; Israel Caraballo; José M Aguilar-Parra

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0272550

Can we speak of a negative psychological tetrad in sports? A probabilistic Bayesian study on competitive sailing

PLoS One. 2022 Aug 11;17(8):e0272550. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272550. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Alejandro García-Mas¹, Bruno Martins¹, Antonio Núñez¹, Francisco J Ponseti¹, Rubén Trigueros², Antonio Alias³, Israel Caraballo⁴, José M Aguilar-Parra²

Affiliations

¹ Research Group on Physical Activity and Sport (GICAFE), University of the Balearic Islands, Illes Balears, Spain.
² Department of Psychology, Hum-878 Research Team, Health Research Centre, University of Almería, Almería, Spain.
³ Department of Education, University of Almería, Almería, Spain.
⁴ Department of Education, University of Cadiz, Cadiz, Spain.

Abstract

Introduction: Researchers display an interest in studying aspects like the mental health of high-performance athletes; the dark side of sport, or the earliest attempts to study the so-called dark triad of personality in both initiation and high-performance athletes. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to determine the possible existence and magnitude of negative psychological aspects within a population of competition sailors and from a probabilistic point of view, using Bayesian Network analysis.

Methods: The study was carried out on 235 semi-professional sailors of the 49er Class, aged between 16 and 52 years (M = 24.66; SD = 8.03).

Results: The results show the existence of a Negative Tetrad-formed by achievement burnout, anxiety due to concentration disruption, amotivation and importance given to error-as a probabilistic product of the psychological variables studied: motivation, anxiety, burnout and fear of error.

Conclusion: These results, supported by Bayesian networks, show holistically the influence of the social context on the psychological and emotional well-being of the athlete during competition at sea.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Adult
Anxiety
Athletes / psychology
Bayes Theorem
Humans
Middle Aged
Motivation
Sports* / psychology
Young Adult

Grants and funding

This study has been partly funded by the European Union Erasmus+ Program entitled: “Integration of elite athletes into the labor market through the valorization of their transversal competences, ELIT-in” (2017–2019), grant number: 590520-EPP. There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.