Emotion and emotion regulation from the perspective of the practitioner

Abstract

Sport is an emotionally charged environment where individuals feel a range of intense emotions, some of which are pleasant and others are unpleasant. There are many antecedents and consequences of emotions, and practitioners need to be aware of such factors. Emotions can also be transmitted between people; for example, if someone is feeling highly anxious, this anxiety can be passed to other people who start feeling anxious themselves. This process can happen in reverse, where you catch the emotions of other people, and if a team is anxious, and wish to feel differently, a practitioner might catch their anxiety. A practitioner must be conscious of these processes and reflect on their influence. This chapter examines emotions experienced by a practitioner and how the practitioner learns to recognise and regulate these emotions so that they can not only be effective, but also maintain the emotional health in others and themselves. Gross and Thompson’s model of emotion regulation is presented, which proposes five families of emotion regulation, four of which are anticipatory (situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, and cognitive change) and one is reactive and deals with emotions once they are experienced (suppression). Prevention is suggested to be better than cure. For a practitioner to help an athlete to regulate her/his emotions requires good estimates of how the athlete is actually feeling and how the athlete wants to feel. Access to these inner states is difficult and work is needed to help practitioners become aware of emotions in others and themselves.