Emotional Responses of Athletes to Injury
Section snippets
Definition of Terms.
For the purposes of this study, an injured athlete is one who, as a consequence of participating in exercise, sports, or a game, sustained an injury. A sport-related injury is one that, as a result of sports, exercise, or a game, restricted activity beyond 1 day after the injury (nomenclature as defined by the American Medical Association) and that motivated the patient to seek treatment in the Section of Sports Medicine at the Mayo Clinic.
Preliminary Studies.
Before this study, 57 injured athletes of various ages,
Characteristics of Study Subjects.
The age distribution of the 72 patients (12 to 54 years) was unimodal and negatively skewed, inasmuch as 33 of them were 16 years old. The majority of the patients (82%) received treatment within 8 days after sustaining an injury, although four patients were examined a few days beyond 2 weeks. More (10) patients were seen on the first day after injury than on any other day. For 69% of patients, it was the first experience with this particular injury, whereas 31% had experienced a similar injury
DISCUSSION
The 72 injured athletes in this study initially rated frustration, depression, and anger highest on the Likert scale of the ERAIQ (Table 1). Of the six POMS scales, depression and anger had the highest scores. Similar mood disturbances were recorded regardless of the method used (volunteering, choosing, rating, or POMS) to assess the emotional response (Table 3). Although the mood scales of depression and anger were significantly elevated in the overall group in comparison with college norms,
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Christine M. Wiltgen (Section of Biostatistics), Joanne Mair (Cardiovascular Research), and Dr. Donald MacEachern (University of Minnesota).
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2021, Physical Therapy in SportCitation Excerpt :Those emotions will dictate the player’s cognitive appraisal of the injury and can negatively affect the player’s engagement with rehabilitation. Severe injuries can result in a more distressing appraisal and reaction, potentially resulting in more setbacks for an athlete (Smith et al. 1990). This was particularly evident for Participants One and Four, who required surgical intervention and reported numerous setbacks and overall loss of strength, speed, and fitness.
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