A person-centred approach to understanding athlete mental health and emotional regulation

Bird, Georgia Amie (2024). A person-centred approach to understanding athlete mental health and emotional regulation. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to investigate student-athletes’ complete mental health and how emotion regulation relates to key indicators of mental health: sport mental well-being and symptoms of mental illness. Following an overview of the mental health and emotional regulation literature in sport and broader psychology in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 narratively synthesized findings from a systematic review investigating the performance and mental health correlates of emotion regulation strategy use for athletes. With 13 studies meeting the inclusion criteria, key gaps were identified: (1) limited consistency in the conceptualization and measurement of mental health and emotion regulation, (2) a lack of literature investigating mental health from a complete state perspective, and (3) limited research on the exploration of a range of emotion regulation strategies. Chapter 3 began to address these gaps and investigated student-athletes’ complete mental health by exploring latent mental health profiles based on patterns in mental well-being, anxiety, and depressive symptoms using latent profile analysis (LPA). The chapter also explored differences in behavioral emotion regulation strategy use and alexithymia between profiles. Chapter 4 replicated the findings of the LPA from Chapter 3, but extended knowledge on differences in other cognitive and behavioral emotion regulation strategies. Chapter 5 furthered knowledge on student-athletes' complete mental health by longitudinally investigating the stability of mental health profile membership and the associations with emotion regulation use to help explain why and how some student-athletes experienced changes and others remained stable in their profile membership. Finally, Chapter 6 included a research note that occurred as an unexpected consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic provided an opportunity to explore student-athletes’ symptoms of mental illness when key features of the sport environment were removed. Overall, this thesis makes novel contributions to the sport mental health literature by exploring student-athlete mental health from a complete state perspective and providing evidence for the association of a wider range of emotion regulation strategy use on indicators of mental well-being, anxiety, and depressive symptoms in this unique population.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):