The Role of the Six Factors Model of Athletic Mental Energy in Mediating Athletes’ Well- being in Competitive Sports

Abstract

Abstract In high performance sports there is a persistent need to succeed for sport players that prioritises performance even at the cost of the player’s well-being. Therefore, researchers in the field of sports psychology are now interested in developing athlete’s psychological profiles that can predict the player’s performance while maintaining the optimal level of their well-being. On the other hand, Athletic Mental Energy (AME) has been recently associated with success in sports and positive emotions. Therefore, our study aimed to explore the role of AME in athletes’ competitive performance and well-being relationships. Since underperformance in elite sports can lead to future performance related anxieties and other psychological disturbances in athletes, our study aimed to investigate if AME in athletes can mediate this directly observed relationship between performance and well-being. The practical implications of this research will enable the sport professionals to develop interventions specifically aimed at enhancing player’s mental energy post-competition to prevent any psychological disturbance that may be raised from the performance and promote players well-being. For stronger predictive validity these relationships were examined across two studies with two different set of participants (Study1 = 50; Study2 = 100), (Study 1 = Male 50%; team-sport 62%; Study 2 = Male 50%; team-sport 78%) from different sport branches (football, cricket, basketball, archery, etc). The self-report measures of sports performance (Arnold, Fletcher, Daniels, 2017), the Athletic Mental Energy Scale (AMES; Lu et al., 2018) [34], and the Psychological Well-Being (PWB) Scale (Ryff et al., 2007; Ryff, 1989) were administered post-competition on the local (study1 = 2%; study2 = 21%), regional (study1 = 4%; study2 = 16%), state (study1 = 28%; study2 = 18%), national (study 1 = 48%; study 2 = 40%), international (study1 = 10%; study2 = 2%), and professional level (study1 = 8%; study2 = 3%) sport-performers of age 18≥. The analysis for both descriptive and inferential statistics was made in the SPSS version 23 and the significance level (α) was set as p < 0.05. Our study found that both, the affective and cognitive components of AME mediated the athletes’ performance and psychological well–being relationship. Finally, the study found no significant gender differences in AME and PWB scores. Moreover, no statistical group differences in family structures were found in scores of AME but some descriptive differences in scores of PWB were found across different family structures. Our results provide preliminary evidence that AME can act as a facilitator in maintaining the players’ well-being after competitive encounters. Study implications and future directions are discussed.