The Effectiveness of a Brief Cognitive Intervention to Help Athletes Cope with Competitive Loss

This study evaluated the affective consequence of losing in a sport competition and the effectiveness of a brief coping intervention in minimizing decreases in positive affect associated with competition loss. A total of 68 female field hockey players, ages 19-47, completed a positive-affect scale before and after losing a competition hockey game. After losing the game but before completing the post-game affect scale, a randomly selected half of the participants, the experimental group, focused on one coping thought and one positive thought related to the game. Control group participants, who did not complete the cognitive intervention after losing, had significantly lower post-game affect than the coping-intervention participants and significantly lower post-game affect than before the game. The findings (a) provide evidence that sport competition loss leads to cognitively-mediated decreases in positive affect, (b) provide support for a specific cognitive approach to coping with sport competition loss, and (c) suggest the question of how to help athletes cope with competition loss warrants further research