Who’s Fault Is It Anyway?: Emotion Regulation in Collegiate Doubles
Alternative Title
Abstract
The objective of the study was to more closely examine cognitive appraisals in competitive dyadic team sports. How an individual perceives a situation can influence the emotions they experience during a game, match, or performance setting. When things aren’t going smoothly, an individual may place blame on
the self, or teammates, leading to feelings of anger (Martinent and Ferrand, 2014; Lazarus, 2000). Self-blame may be more harmful to competitive sports since it has no functionality within competition. Investigating dyadic interactions, Deck (2020) found that “there is a relationship… between how one partner is playing and
how the other partner is playing.” This suggests that emotion regulation can impact competitive performance within dyads. Lewis, Knight, and Mallalieu (2017) found that youth tennis players undergo a variety of discrete emotions directly before, during, and after a competition. Fristch et. al. (2020) underscored the negative emotional impact of debilitative self-talk in players, seemingly supporting Lazarus’ (2000) theory of the danger of self-blame. Doubles in tennis allow for similar levels of emotionality to the standard singles but with the addition of a partner to whom responsibility can be attributed either positively or negatively. This makes it a prime candidate for investigating cognitive appraisals of discrete emotions with an emphasis on the attribution of blame. The purpose of this study was to investigate emotional experiences and regulation within tennis doubles through semi-structured interviews. We were specifically interested in seeing how players manage not only their emotions but the emotions of their partner and how this impacted performance (wins/losses). We hypothesized that teams that were
more effective at emotion regulation would win a greater proportion of matches than teams that were not effective at emotion regulation. Preliminary results from the three doubles teams interviewed seem to suggest that players are not as concerned with the attribution of blame as predicted and instead are more aware of regulating their emotions, regulating their partner’s emotions, building and maintaining an effective partnership, and skill.