A daily diary study of interpersonal emotion regulation, the social environment, and team performance among university athletes

Abstract

Interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) refers to social interactions that are intended to improve or worsen the emotions of others (Niven et al., 2011), and IER has been associated with emotional and motivational outcomes for athletes (Tamminen et al., 2016). Qualitative findings suggest IER among teammates is associated with performance, and that it is also important to consider IER interactions within the context of athletes’ social environment (Campo et al., 2017; Palmateer & Tamminen, 2018). The purpose of this research was to quantitatively examine these proposed associations among a sample of 59 university team sport athletes over a 10-day period. Athletes completed measures of perceived esteem support (Freeman & Rees, 2009) and social cohesion (Eys et al., 2009), and they rated the extent to which they provided and received affect-improving or affect-worsening IER with teammates in the days prior to and following a competition. Piecewise multilevel models were used to model changes in IER before and after competition. Overall, athletes’ engagement in affect-worsening IER decreased in the days before competition, while providing and receiving affect-improving IER decreased in the days following competition. Esteem support moderated some of these trajectories of IER, and there were interactions between esteem support and competition outcome on the trajectories of IER: more supported athletes reported providing and receiving more affect-worsening IER before a loss. Esteem support and affect-worsening IER also interacted to predict the team’s competition outcome: among athletes who perceived more esteem support, decreases in the receipt of affect-worsening IER in the days before competition was predictive of the team winning their competition. Social cohesion did not moderate any of the associations between IER, time, and performance outcome. These results suggest that athletes’ daily IER exchanges among teammates and their perceptions of esteem support have implications for team performance.