Emotion regulation among competitive youth athletes: exploring the independent and interactive effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression

Emotion regulation is important for individual well-being and performance across sport and non-sport contexts. However, studies focusing specifically on youth athletes' emotion regulation are comparatively rare. This study examined how youth athletes' engagement in two common emotion regulation strategies, namely cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, related to key outcomes including pleasant and unpleasant emotions felt, enjoyment, intentions to return, confidence, satisfaction, and emotional and social loneliness. Prior to the main analyses, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test the factorial validity of the responses obtained with the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents [ERQ-CA; Gullone & Taffe, 2012. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA): A psychometric evaluation. Psychological Assessment, 24(2), 409-417] that was adapted to youth sport contexts. A cross-sectional online survey was administered with 448 youth athletes (M-age = 15.1 years old, SD = 2.3) in competitive sports. Confirmatory factor analyses showed suboptimal factor loadings for three items, and they were thus removed from subsequent analyses. Polynomial regressions with response surface analyses were used to explore the independent effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on the outcome variables, as well as their interactive effects on these outcomes. The results showed that more favourable levels of outcome variables were associated with greater use of cognitive reappraisal and less use of expressive suppression. The results demonstrate the benefits of cognitive reappraisal and the detriments of expressive suppression for youth athletes, and provide evidence for the usefulness of the adapted version of the ERQ-CA in youth sport contexts.