The role of the six factors model of athletic mental energy in mediating athletes’ well-being in competitive sports

Abstract

In the realm of high-performance sports, athletes often prioritize success at the expense of their well-being. Consequently, sports psychology researchers are now focusing on creating psychological profiles for athletes that can forecast their performance while safeguarding their overall well-being. A recent development in this field is the concept of athletic mental energy (AME), which has been associated with both sporting success and positive emotions. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore if AME in athletes can mediate this directly observed relationship between performance and psychological well-being. For stronger predictive validity these relationships were examined across two studies with each involving distinct sets of participants engaged in various sports disciplines, including football, cricket, basketball, archery, and more. The self-report measures of sports performance, athletic mental energy (AME), and psychological well-being (PWB) were administered post-competition on the local, regional, state, national, international, and professional level athletes of age 18 and above. Our study found that both, the affective and cognitive components of AME mediated the athletes’ performance and psychological well–being relationship. Interestingly, the study found no significant gender differences in AME and PWB scores. While family structures didn’t yield significant variations in AME scores, there were some descriptive distinctions in PWB scores across different family structures. Our research offers preliminary evidence suggesting that AME can play a pivotal role in preserving athletes’ psychological well-being following competitive events.