Professional male rugby union players' perceived psychological recovery and physical regeneration during the off-season.

We explored male professional rugby union players' experiences and perceptions of their mental and physical health and well-being across the northern hemisphere off-season. 34 professional male rugby union players participated in individual semistructured interviews (mean (SD) age=27.5 (4.3) years). Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The off-season was characterised by three phases players undergo to preserve their mental and physical health and well-being to recover from the previous season and regenerate in preparation for the upcoming season. These included decompression from previous season, cognitive detachment from the rugby environment and preparation for preseason. Successful progression through all three phases was influenced by several variables (work and life demands, contextual factors, experience level). Recovery and regeneration strategies focused on physical distancing/getting away from the rugby environment to cognitively detach. Injured players appear an at-risk subgroup for threats to mental well-being (isolation, anxiety, reduced sense of achievement) as a result of reduced or minimal time away from the workplace due to treatment obligations. Younger professionals are a subgroup at risk of overtraining/injury due to inadequate rest, especially as this group are least likely to seek support/guidance. This study is the first investigation into male professional rugby union players' experiences and perceptions of their mental and physical health and well-being across the off-season period. It highlights the distinct phases players undertake to mentally recover and regenerate and the need to consider education and support for potential at risk subgroups.

Athletes' Social Identities: Their Influence on Precompetitive Group-Based Emotions.

This research studied the influence of multiple social identities on the emotions that athletes felt toward their teammates/partners and opponents. Athletes (N = 714) from individual and team-based sports reported their identification both as athletes of the sport and as athletes of their club before reporting their precompetitive emotions. The results showed that these multiple social identities influenced precompetitive emotions toward different targets, with higher levels of sport identification associated with increased positive and decreased negative emotions toward opponents and higher levels of club identification associated with increased positive and decreased negative emotions toward teammates/partners, although increased club identification was also associated with more positive emotions toward opponents. These findings extend intergroup emotions theory by showing its suitability and applicability to face-to-face task-oriented teams in sport. Particularly, they highlight the importance of investigating the simultaneous level of multiple social identities, rather than only a dichotomic self-categorization, on group-based emotions experienced toward multiple targets.

Emotions and performance in rugby.

PURPOSE: This study investigated emotion-performance relationships in rugby union. We identified which emotions rugby players experienced and the extent to which these emotions were associated with performance, considering how emotions unfold over the course of a game, and whether the game was played at home or away. METHODS: Data were gathered from 22 professional male rugby union players using auto-confrontation interviews to help identify situations within games when players experienced intense emotions. We assessed the intensity of emotions experienced before each discrete performance and therefore could assess the emotion-performance relationship within a competition. RESULTS: Players identified experiencing intense emotions at 189 time-points. Experts in rugby union rated the quality of each performance at these 189 time-points on a visual analog scale. A Linear Mixed Effects model to investigate emotion-performance relationships found additive effects of game location, game time, and emotions on individual performance. CONCLUSION: Results showed 7 different pre-performance emotions, with high anxiety and anger associating with poor performance. Future research should continue to investigate emotion-performance relationships during performance using video-assisted recall and use a measure of performance that has face validity for players and coaches alike.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) Training Adapted to the International Preparation Constraints in Rugby: Influence of EI Trainer Status on EI Training Effectiveness.

Given the positive influence of emotional intelligence (EI) on sports performance, particular attention should be paid on how to improve it. Following promising results, previous research concluding that it was possible to improve EI via specific training programs also raised considerable debates. Indeed, previous EI training programs were very time-consuming for participants. This lessens consequently their suitability with the schedule constraints of elite sport. While, in the absence of sport psychologists, numerous coaches or physiologists try to work with players to improve their emotional competences, the aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of EI training programs fitting the schedule constraints of elite team sports, provided by three different EI trainers: the team's coach, the team's physiotherapist, and an expert in sport psychology. Young elite rugby union players (N = 96) participated in this study. Based on schedule constraints imposed by the head coach of the French u18 rugby union national team, the program consisted in three 1 h group-based EI training sessions occurring the last 3 days before a game (1 per day). Linear mixed-effects models showed that despite the constraining organizational challenge imposed by the coach, the intervention helped the players to increase some emotional competences at the trait level. Furthermore, a pairwise analysis showed that the type of emotional competencies developed depended on the status of the EI trainers. These findings highlight the suitability of a group-based approach in the training-week structure. They also point the way to EI improvement in a short period of time. Moreover, the specific influences of the EI trainer's status on players' EI development invite coaches and researchers to jointly combine their efforts in order to increase the EI training opportunities and to maximize the effects of their interventions. Together, these preliminary results provide first evidence facilitating the integration of such work in the preparation periods during international seasons.

Emotions in Group Sports: A Narrative Review From a Social Identity Perspective.

Recently, novel lines of research have developed to study the influence of identity processes in sport-related behaviors. Yet, whereas emotions in sport are the result of a complex psychosocial process, little attention has been paid to examining the mechanisms that underlie how group membership influences athletes' emotional experiences. The present narrative review aims at complementing the comprehensive review produced by Rees et al. (2015) on social identity in sport by reporting specific work on identity-based emotions in sport. To that end, we firstly overview the different terminology currently used in the field of emotions in groups to clarify the distinct nature of emotions that result from an individual's social identity. Secondly, we discuss key concepts of social identity to better understand the mechanisms underlying identity-based emotions. Thirdly, we address existing knowledge on identity-based emotions in sport. We close the present narrative review by suggesting future research perspectives based on existing meta-theories of social identity. Evidence from the social psychology literature is discussed alongside existing works from the sport literature to propose a crucial theoretical approach to better understand emotions in sport.

Group-Based Emotions: Evidence for Emotion-Performance Relationships in Team Sports.

PURPOSE: In team sports, players have to manage personal interests and group goals, emphasizing intricacies between personal and social identities. The focus of this article was to examine the effect of identity mechanisms on appraisal processes, based on the following research question: Does the level of self-abstraction (low [personal identity] versus high [social identity]) lead to group-based emotions and influence performances? METHOD: An experimental design was used in which the level of self-abstraction was manipulated through the induction of a self- versus a team-oriented goal. Thirty elite male rugby players (Mage = 19.06, SD = 0.78, randomly split) participated in a match reproducing conditions similar to those of official games. Individual and perceived team-level emotions and performance were measured 17 times during the match. RESULTS: Linear Mixed Effects models showed that a high level of self-abstraction: (a) led to more positive and less negative individual (variances explained: 52% and 46%) and perceived team-referent (variances explained: 57% and 40%) emotions; (b) reduced the correlation of team-referent emotions with individual ones; and (c) positively influenced team and individual performances (variances explained: 50% and 19%). Moreover, after controlling for potential effects of the level of self-abstraction, only positive team-referent emotions influenced performance. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to experimentally manipulate athletes' social identity to examine group-based emotions in sport. Challenging the usual intrapersonal approaches, these findings suggested that social identity and its association with team-referent emotions could be one of the key dimensions of emotion-performance relationships in team sports.

A cluster analysis of affective states before and during competition.

The purposes of the current study were to identify affective profiles of athletes both before and during the competition and to examine differences between these profiles on coping and attainment of sport goals among a sample of 306 athletes. The results of hierarchical (Ward's method) and nonhierarchical (k means) cluster analyses revealed four different clusters both before and during the competition. The four clusters were very similar at the two measurement occasions: high positive affect facilitators (n = 88 and 81), facilitators (n = 75 and 25), low affect debilitators (n = 83 and 127), and high negative affect debilitators (n = 60 and 73). Results of MANOVAs revealed that coping and attainment of sport achievement goal significantly differed across the affective profiles. Results are discussed in terms of current research on positive and negative affective states.