Explanatory Style as a Mechanism of Disappointing Athletic Performance

Martin E. P. Seligman · Susan Nolen–Hoeksema · Nort Thornton · Karen Moe Thornton

204 citations0/0 files storedPsychological Science

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Sport Psychology and Performance Psychological Treatments and Assessments Optimism, Hope, and Well-being

Abstract

Two university varsity swimming teams took the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) at the start of the season. Swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory style went on to show more unexpected poor performances during competition than optimistic swimmers. We then tested the purported mechanism of this effect by experimentally simulating defeat, giving each swimmer falsely negative times. Performance deteriorated for those swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory style for bad events on their next swim, whereas performance for those swimmers with an optimistic style did not.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 204 citations exist upstream.

References

1978Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation.1975Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death 1984Negative affectivity: The disposition to experience aversive emotional states.1987Sex differences in unipolar depression: Evidence and theory.1982The attributional Style Questionnaire 1984Causal explanations as a risk factor for depression: Theory and evidence.1987Dispositional Optimism and Physical Well‐Being: The Influence of Generalized Outcome Expectancies on Health 1979Depressive attributional style.

Cited by

2015Thinking About Rumination: The Scholarly Contributions and Intellectual Legacy of Susan Nolen-Hoeksema 1997Retirement from sport and the loss of athletic identity 2012Self-Enhancement and Self-Protection Motives 2017Stressing the relevance of resilience: a systematic review of resilience across the domains of sport and work 2003Explanatory style and resilience after sports failure 2014

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.