- Email: [email protected]
The psychosocial development of world-class athletes: Additional considerations for understanding the whole person and salience of adversity
CHAPTER
The psychosocial development of world-class athletes: Additional considerations for understanding the whole person and salience of adversity
3
Daniel F. Gucciardi1 School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia 1 Corresponding author: Tel.: +61-8-9266-3653; Fax: +61-8-9266-3699, e-mail address: [email protected]
Abstract In the target article, Hardy and colleagues provided an incisive analysis of retrospectively reported psychosocial factors associated with the development and careers of 32 former athletes from Olympic sports. They found that Super-Elite athletes (“serial” medal winners at major international championships, i.e., World Championship or Olympic Games) differed from matched Elite performers (won medals at international competitions but not major championships) with regard to several important psychosocial factors (e.g., negative life events, turning point, relative importance of sport). In this commentary, I critique and extend upon these key findings to delineate additional considerations for understanding the whole person (i.e., traits, characteristic adaptations, narrative identity) and salience of adversity (i.e., timing, frequency, and duration) with the goal to stimulate future research and theory on the psychosocial development of Olympic champions.
Keywords Cumulative life adversity, Multilayered personality, Psychological self, Resilience
Hardy and colleagues provided an incisive analysis of retrospectively reported psychosocial factors associated with the development and careers of 32 former athletes from Olympic sports. Of particular interest was an exploration of commonalities and Progress in Brain Research, Volume 232, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2016.11.006 © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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discriminators between Super-Elite (“serial” medal winners at major international championships, i.e., World Championship or Olympic Games) and matched Elite athletes (won medals at international competitions but not major championships). I congratulate Hardy and colleagues on their efforts to shed light on the complex relations among childhood and sporting experiences, psychological factors, and behavioral dimensions considered central to the development of world-class athletes. In this commentary, my goals are to critique and extend upon two key findings reported in the target article in a way that I hope will stimulate future research and theory on the psychosocial development of Olympic champions.
1 CONTEXT OF ADVERSITY: HOW MUCH? HOW OFTEN? The notion that past experiences of adversity, particularly during childhood, may have a “steeling effect” (i.e., decrease vulnerability/strengthen resistance) on future encounters with adversity is not new (e.g., Garmezy, 1986). Hardy and colleagues’ findings (see also Howells and Fletcher, 2015; Sarkar et al., 2015) are consistent with and extend this proposition to the psychosocial development of Super-Elite athletes. One interesting finding is that negative foundational events occurred in close proximity to a positive sporting incident, most often shortly afterward. Although not acknowledged by Hardy and colleagues, many of the positive sporting events reported by the Super-Elite athletes resemble the broad domains of posttraumatic growth, whereby individuals report a greater appreciation of life; relationships with others that are closer, more intimate, and meaningful; heightened or greater awareness of personal strengths; new possibilities or paths for one’s life; and greater engagement with spiritual or existential matters (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 2004). Nevertheless, as with much of the work on posttraumatic growth, the cross-sectional and retrospective nature of Hardy and colleagues’ research means little can be gleaned about the temporal dynamics between negative and positive life experiences. Clarity regarding the salience and temporal dynamics of critical life events for the psychosocial development of Super-Elite performers requires contextual information on their timing, frequency, and duration (Gest et al., 1999; Schoon et al., 2002). Each of the Super-Elite athletes experienced at least one foundational negative critical event, yet Hardy et al. excluded any detail regarding their cumulative lifetime adversities. Research supports a quadratic rather than linear association between cumulative lifetime adversity and human growth and development, such that a moderate number of adverse events are most beneficial (e.g., Seery et al., 2010, 2013). Elsewhere Olympic champions recalled repeated exposure to nonselection for international competitions as the most salient adversity experienced during their careers (Sarkar et al., 2015). Future research would do well to consider systematically cumulative lifetime adversity and its relations with important athlete behaviors and outcomes (e.g., performance). The issues of timing and duration are also important considerations for a nuanced understanding of the salience of adverse events. Most of the negative foundational
2 Athletes as actors, agents, and authors
experiences reported by the Super-Elite athletes encompassed enduring periods of stress, such as an absent father, mental health issues of family members, and bullying at school, rather than one-off incidents. For several athletes, their enduring periods of adverse events encompassed multiple adversities such as financial problems alongside parental divorce and mental illness (N-SE). As adverse events often cooccur over the lifetime (Green et al., 2010), it is difficult to understand the effects or subjective experience of a single incident when it occurred alongside other adversities. For example, the death of a loved one is an acute event but can have enduring effects within which time individuals may experience other adversities (e.g., bullying). Analogous to building physical fitness, intermittent exposure to stressors can enable individuals to develop or enhance future capacities (e.g., “toughening”; Dienstbier, 1989), yet chronic or prolonged experiences may have stronger effects on functioning (e.g., Ackerman et al., 1999; Bronfenbrenner and Evans, 2000). Knowledge of when adverse events occurred and for how they long they endured can shed light on important developmental processes, such as critical periods of vulnerability (e.g., childhood exposure is more consequential than adolescent events) and phenomenological differences (e.g., immediate or delayed effects). However, this detail was largely absent from Hardy and colleagues’ exposition of the findings. Such information will prove fruitful for future work, for example, mapping life events against archival data to better understand the effects of adverse events on athletes’ performance trajectories.
2 ATHLETES AS ACTORS, AGENTS, AND AUTHORS Consistent with models of talent (e.g., Gagne, 2009) and athletic (e.g., Bergeron et al., 2015) development, Hardy and colleagues’ findings underscored the importance of ongoing interactions among an array of environmental (e.g., foundational critical events) and personal factors (e.g., conscientiousness) throughout an athlete’s life. Much has been written about talent development environments, including the identification and classification of essential structures and processes (for a review, see Li et al., 2014). Researchers have identified several fundamental psychological characteristics that foster positive interactions with the environment and outcomes from those experiences (e.g., Gould et al., 2002; MacNamara et al., 2010), many of which are echoed in the findings of Hardy and colleagues. However, missing from Hardy et al.’s analysis and past work on the psychological characteristics associated with athletic excellence is the integration of these different aspects of the self in a coherent and meaningful manner that provides clarity regarding the “whole person” who is situated in social and cultural contexts. One integrative model of the psychological self is that of three broad metaphors, namely, the social actor, motivated agent, and autobiographical author (McAdams, 2013). This metaphorical perspective builds on a conceptualization of human personality in which individuality is understood across three separate yet related layers of psychological content (McAdams and Pals, 2006). The foundation of personality
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is dispositional traits, which reflect consistencies in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across situations, contexts, and time as they “act” on the social stage and are observed by others (McAdams, 2013). Most readers will be familiar with this layer of personality in terms of the “Big Five” traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Traits emerge from birth (e.g., temperament) and begin to stabilize during adolescence, yet evolve continuously over time through complex interactions between genes and environment, particularly during early adulthood (Roberts et al., 2006). Referred to as characteristic adaptations, the next layer of personality is contextualized in time, place, and/or social role and reflects people as motivated agents (McAdams and Pals, 2006). In this sense, agency captures people’s wants, goals, and values for the future, and how they go about achieving those objectives in purposeful and goal-directed ways (McAdams, 2013). This dynamic layer of personality emerges around mid-to-late childhood and varies depending on the time, context, and/or social role (McAdams and Pals, 2006). Layered over one’s reputational signature of the present and motivational agenda for the future are internalized stories that integrate and make sense of one’s past, present, and future self in ways that offer unity, purpose, and coherence (McAdams and McLean, 2013). The autobiographical author emerges during early adulthood (McAdams and Pals, 2006) and evolves through efforts to draw insight and meaning from important experiences (e.g., turning points) and arrange multiple episodes or events in ways that provide causal inferences about their development and who they are (Habermas and Bluck, 2000). As reported by Hardy and colleagues, the psychological characteristics associated with sporting excellence are evident across all three layers of personality, including the social actor (e.g., conscientiousness), motivated agent (e.g., need for success), and autobiographical author (e.g., “finding” sport as an alternative means for recognition or acceptance). However, the limited integrative analysis of these dimensions means the key strength of breadth of information regarding the psychological makeup of Super-Elite athletes is diluted. Elsewhere my colleagues and I have called for scholars to embrace a multilayered perspective of personality within sport and exercise psychology contexts (Coulter et al., 2016; Gucciardi and Hanton, 2016), and demonstrated the usefulness of this integrative framework to understand mentally tough behaviors (Gucciardi et al., 2015). Future research on the psychological makeup of athletic excellence would benefit from bringing together diverse data on each of these three unique layers of personality in an attempt to understand the person in full.
3 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS The impressive array of findings reported by Hardy et al. offers an important insight into the psychosocial factors of sporting excellence. My hope is that the value of their work for guiding future research is maximized through (i) systematic efforts to delineate contextual information on the timing, frequency, and duration of adversities
References
experienced during one’s upbringing and involvement in sport, and (ii) integrative approaches to understanding unique layers of the psychological self.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT Funding statement. D.F.G. is supported by a Curtin Research Fellowship.
REFERENCES Ackerman, B.P., Izard, C.E., Schoff, K., Youngstrom, E.A., Kogos, J., 1999. Contextual risk, caregiver emotionality, and the problem behaviours of six- and seven-year-old children from economically disadvantaged families. Child Dev. 70, 1415–1427. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/1467-8624.00103. Bergeron, M.F., Mountjoy, M., Armstrong, N., Chia, M., C^ ote, J., Emery, C.A., et al., 2015. International Olympic Committee consensus statement on youth athletic development. Br. J. Sports Med. 49, 843–851. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2015-094962. Bronfenbrenner, U., Evans, G.W., 2000. Developmental science in the 21st century: emerging theoretical models, research designs, and empirical findings. Soc. Dev. 9, 115–125. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9507.00114. Coulter, T., Mallett, C.J., Singer, J., Gucciardi, D.F., 2016. Personality in sport and exercise psychology: integrating a whole person perspective. Int. J. Sport Exerc. Psychol. 14, 23–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1612197X.2015.1016085. Dienstbier, R.A., 1989. Arousal and physiological toughness: implications for mental and physical health. Psychol. Rev. 96, 84–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.1.84. Gagne, F., 2009. Building gifts into talents: detailed overview of the DMGT 2.0. In: MacFarlane, B., Stambaugh, T. (Eds.), Leading Change in Gifted Education: The Festschrift of Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska. Prufrock Press, Waco, TX, pp. 61–80. Garmezy, N., 1986. Developmental aspects of children’s responses to the stress of separation and loss. In: Rutter, M., Izard, C.E., Read, P.B. (Eds.), Depression in Young People: Developmental and Clinical Perspectives. Guilford Press, New York, pp. 297–323. Gest, S.D., Reed, M.G.J., Masten, A.S., 1999. Measuring developmental changes in exposure to adversity: a life chart and rating scale approach. Dev. Psychopathol. 11, 171–192. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1017/S095457949900200X. Gould, D., Dieffenbach, K., Moffett, A., 2002. Psychological characteristics and their development in Olympic champions. J. Appl. Sport Psychol. 14, 172–204. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/10413200290103482. Green, J.G., McLaughlin, K.A., Berglund, P.A., Gruber, M.J., Sampson, N.A., Zaslavsky, A.M., et al., 2010. Childhood adversities and adult psychiatric disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication I: associations with first onset of DSM-IV disorders. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 67, 113–123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/ archgenpsychiatry.2009.186. Gucciardi, D.F., Hanton, S., 2016. Mental toughness: critical reflections and future considerations. In: Schinke, R., McGannon, K., Smith, B. (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Sport Psychology. Routledge, New York, pp. 439–448.
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Gucciardi, D.F., Jackson, B., Hanton, S., Reid, M., 2015. Motivational correlates of mentally tough behaviours in tennis. J. Sci. Med. Sport 18, 67–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. jsams.2013.11.009. Habermas, T., Bluck, S., 2000. Getting a life: the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Psychol. Bull. 126, 748–769. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.748. Howells, K., Fletcher, D., 2015. Sink or swim: adversity- and growth-related experiences in Olympic swimming champions. Psychol. Sport Exerc. 16, 37–48. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.08.004. Li, C., Wang, C.K.J., Pyun, D.Y., 2014. Talent development environmental factors in sport: a review and taxonomic classification. Quest 66, 433–447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 00336297.2014.944715. MacNamara, A., Button, A., Collins, D., 2010. The role of psychological characteristics in facilitating the pathway to elite performance. Part 1: identifying mental skills and behaviours. Sport Psychol. 24, 52–73. McAdams, D.P., 2013. The psychological self as actor, agent, and author. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 8, 272–295. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691612464657. McAdams, D.P., McLean, K.C., 2013. Narrative identity. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 22, 233–238. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622. McAdams, D.P., Pals, J.L., 2006. A new Big Five: fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality. Am. Psychol. 61, 204–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X. 61.3.204. Roberts, B.W., Walton, K.E., Viechtbauer, W., 2006. Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychol. Bull. 132, 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1. Sarkar, M., Fletcher, D., Brown, D.J., 2015. What doesn’t kill me…: adversity-related experiences are vital in the development of superior Olympic performance. J. Sci. Med. Sport 18, 475–479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2014.06.010. Schoon, I., Bynner, J., Joshi, H., Parsons, S., Wiggins, R.D., Sacker, A., 2002. The influence of context, timing, and duration of risk experiences for the passage from childhood to midadulthood. Child Dev. 73, 1486–1504. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00485. Seery, M.D., Holman, E.A., Silver, R.C., 2010. Whatever does not kill us: cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 99, 1025–1041. http://dx.doi. org/10.1037/a0021344. Seery, M.D., Leo, R.J., Lupien, S.P., Kondrak, C.L., Almonte, J.L., 2013. An upside to adversity? Moderate cumulative lifetime adversity is associated with resilient responses in the face of controlled stressors. Psychol. Sci. 24, 1181–1189. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1177/0956797612469210. Tedeschi, R.G., Calhoun, L.G., 2004. Posttraumatic growth: conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychol. Inq. 15, 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1501_01.
The psychosocial development of world-class athletes: Additional considerations for understanding the whole person and salience of adversity
3
Daniel F. Gucciardi1 School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia 1 Corresponding author: Tel.: +61-8-9266-3653; Fax: +61-8-9266-3699, e-mail address: [email protected]
Abstract In the target article, Hardy and colleagues provided an incisive analysis of retrospectively reported psychosocial factors associated with the development and careers of 32 former athletes from Olympic sports. They found that Super-Elite athletes (“serial” medal winners at major international championships, i.e., World Championship or Olympic Games) differed from matched Elite performers (won medals at international competitions but not major championships) with regard to several important psychosocial factors (e.g., negative life events, turning point, relative importance of sport). In this commentary, I critique and extend upon these key findings to delineate additional considerations for understanding the whole person (i.e., traits, characteristic adaptations, narrative identity) and salience of adversity (i.e., timing, frequency, and duration) with the goal to stimulate future research and theory on the psychosocial development of Olympic champions.
Keywords Cumulative life adversity, Multilayered personality, Psychological self, Resilience
Hardy and colleagues provided an incisive analysis of retrospectively reported psychosocial factors associated with the development and careers of 32 former athletes from Olympic sports. Of particular interest was an exploration of commonalities and Progress in Brain Research, Volume 232, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2016.11.006 © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
127
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discriminators between Super-Elite (“serial” medal winners at major international championships, i.e., World Championship or Olympic Games) and matched Elite athletes (won medals at international competitions but not major championships). I congratulate Hardy and colleagues on their efforts to shed light on the complex relations among childhood and sporting experiences, psychological factors, and behavioral dimensions considered central to the development of world-class athletes. In this commentary, my goals are to critique and extend upon two key findings reported in the target article in a way that I hope will stimulate future research and theory on the psychosocial development of Olympic champions.
1 CONTEXT OF ADVERSITY: HOW MUCH? HOW OFTEN? The notion that past experiences of adversity, particularly during childhood, may have a “steeling effect” (i.e., decrease vulnerability/strengthen resistance) on future encounters with adversity is not new (e.g., Garmezy, 1986). Hardy and colleagues’ findings (see also Howells and Fletcher, 2015; Sarkar et al., 2015) are consistent with and extend this proposition to the psychosocial development of Super-Elite athletes. One interesting finding is that negative foundational events occurred in close proximity to a positive sporting incident, most often shortly afterward. Although not acknowledged by Hardy and colleagues, many of the positive sporting events reported by the Super-Elite athletes resemble the broad domains of posttraumatic growth, whereby individuals report a greater appreciation of life; relationships with others that are closer, more intimate, and meaningful; heightened or greater awareness of personal strengths; new possibilities or paths for one’s life; and greater engagement with spiritual or existential matters (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 2004). Nevertheless, as with much of the work on posttraumatic growth, the cross-sectional and retrospective nature of Hardy and colleagues’ research means little can be gleaned about the temporal dynamics between negative and positive life experiences. Clarity regarding the salience and temporal dynamics of critical life events for the psychosocial development of Super-Elite performers requires contextual information on their timing, frequency, and duration (Gest et al., 1999; Schoon et al., 2002). Each of the Super-Elite athletes experienced at least one foundational negative critical event, yet Hardy et al. excluded any detail regarding their cumulative lifetime adversities. Research supports a quadratic rather than linear association between cumulative lifetime adversity and human growth and development, such that a moderate number of adverse events are most beneficial (e.g., Seery et al., 2010, 2013). Elsewhere Olympic champions recalled repeated exposure to nonselection for international competitions as the most salient adversity experienced during their careers (Sarkar et al., 2015). Future research would do well to consider systematically cumulative lifetime adversity and its relations with important athlete behaviors and outcomes (e.g., performance). The issues of timing and duration are also important considerations for a nuanced understanding of the salience of adverse events. Most of the negative foundational
2 Athletes as actors, agents, and authors
experiences reported by the Super-Elite athletes encompassed enduring periods of stress, such as an absent father, mental health issues of family members, and bullying at school, rather than one-off incidents. For several athletes, their enduring periods of adverse events encompassed multiple adversities such as financial problems alongside parental divorce and mental illness (N-SE). As adverse events often cooccur over the lifetime (Green et al., 2010), it is difficult to understand the effects or subjective experience of a single incident when it occurred alongside other adversities. For example, the death of a loved one is an acute event but can have enduring effects within which time individuals may experience other adversities (e.g., bullying). Analogous to building physical fitness, intermittent exposure to stressors can enable individuals to develop or enhance future capacities (e.g., “toughening”; Dienstbier, 1989), yet chronic or prolonged experiences may have stronger effects on functioning (e.g., Ackerman et al., 1999; Bronfenbrenner and Evans, 2000). Knowledge of when adverse events occurred and for how they long they endured can shed light on important developmental processes, such as critical periods of vulnerability (e.g., childhood exposure is more consequential than adolescent events) and phenomenological differences (e.g., immediate or delayed effects). However, this detail was largely absent from Hardy and colleagues’ exposition of the findings. Such information will prove fruitful for future work, for example, mapping life events against archival data to better understand the effects of adverse events on athletes’ performance trajectories.
2 ATHLETES AS ACTORS, AGENTS, AND AUTHORS Consistent with models of talent (e.g., Gagne, 2009) and athletic (e.g., Bergeron et al., 2015) development, Hardy and colleagues’ findings underscored the importance of ongoing interactions among an array of environmental (e.g., foundational critical events) and personal factors (e.g., conscientiousness) throughout an athlete’s life. Much has been written about talent development environments, including the identification and classification of essential structures and processes (for a review, see Li et al., 2014). Researchers have identified several fundamental psychological characteristics that foster positive interactions with the environment and outcomes from those experiences (e.g., Gould et al., 2002; MacNamara et al., 2010), many of which are echoed in the findings of Hardy and colleagues. However, missing from Hardy et al.’s analysis and past work on the psychological characteristics associated with athletic excellence is the integration of these different aspects of the self in a coherent and meaningful manner that provides clarity regarding the “whole person” who is situated in social and cultural contexts. One integrative model of the psychological self is that of three broad metaphors, namely, the social actor, motivated agent, and autobiographical author (McAdams, 2013). This metaphorical perspective builds on a conceptualization of human personality in which individuality is understood across three separate yet related layers of psychological content (McAdams and Pals, 2006). The foundation of personality
129
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is dispositional traits, which reflect consistencies in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across situations, contexts, and time as they “act” on the social stage and are observed by others (McAdams, 2013). Most readers will be familiar with this layer of personality in terms of the “Big Five” traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Traits emerge from birth (e.g., temperament) and begin to stabilize during adolescence, yet evolve continuously over time through complex interactions between genes and environment, particularly during early adulthood (Roberts et al., 2006). Referred to as characteristic adaptations, the next layer of personality is contextualized in time, place, and/or social role and reflects people as motivated agents (McAdams and Pals, 2006). In this sense, agency captures people’s wants, goals, and values for the future, and how they go about achieving those objectives in purposeful and goal-directed ways (McAdams, 2013). This dynamic layer of personality emerges around mid-to-late childhood and varies depending on the time, context, and/or social role (McAdams and Pals, 2006). Layered over one’s reputational signature of the present and motivational agenda for the future are internalized stories that integrate and make sense of one’s past, present, and future self in ways that offer unity, purpose, and coherence (McAdams and McLean, 2013). The autobiographical author emerges during early adulthood (McAdams and Pals, 2006) and evolves through efforts to draw insight and meaning from important experiences (e.g., turning points) and arrange multiple episodes or events in ways that provide causal inferences about their development and who they are (Habermas and Bluck, 2000). As reported by Hardy and colleagues, the psychological characteristics associated with sporting excellence are evident across all three layers of personality, including the social actor (e.g., conscientiousness), motivated agent (e.g., need for success), and autobiographical author (e.g., “finding” sport as an alternative means for recognition or acceptance). However, the limited integrative analysis of these dimensions means the key strength of breadth of information regarding the psychological makeup of Super-Elite athletes is diluted. Elsewhere my colleagues and I have called for scholars to embrace a multilayered perspective of personality within sport and exercise psychology contexts (Coulter et al., 2016; Gucciardi and Hanton, 2016), and demonstrated the usefulness of this integrative framework to understand mentally tough behaviors (Gucciardi et al., 2015). Future research on the psychological makeup of athletic excellence would benefit from bringing together diverse data on each of these three unique layers of personality in an attempt to understand the person in full.
3 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS The impressive array of findings reported by Hardy et al. offers an important insight into the psychosocial factors of sporting excellence. My hope is that the value of their work for guiding future research is maximized through (i) systematic efforts to delineate contextual information on the timing, frequency, and duration of adversities
References
experienced during one’s upbringing and involvement in sport, and (ii) integrative approaches to understanding unique layers of the psychological self.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT Funding statement. D.F.G. is supported by a Curtin Research Fellowship.
REFERENCES Ackerman, B.P., Izard, C.E., Schoff, K., Youngstrom, E.A., Kogos, J., 1999. Contextual risk, caregiver emotionality, and the problem behaviours of six- and seven-year-old children from economically disadvantaged families. Child Dev. 70, 1415–1427. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/1467-8624.00103. Bergeron, M.F., Mountjoy, M., Armstrong, N., Chia, M., C^ ote, J., Emery, C.A., et al., 2015. International Olympic Committee consensus statement on youth athletic development. Br. J. Sports Med. 49, 843–851. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2015-094962. Bronfenbrenner, U., Evans, G.W., 2000. Developmental science in the 21st century: emerging theoretical models, research designs, and empirical findings. Soc. Dev. 9, 115–125. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9507.00114. Coulter, T., Mallett, C.J., Singer, J., Gucciardi, D.F., 2016. Personality in sport and exercise psychology: integrating a whole person perspective. Int. J. Sport Exerc. Psychol. 14, 23–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1612197X.2015.1016085. Dienstbier, R.A., 1989. Arousal and physiological toughness: implications for mental and physical health. Psychol. Rev. 96, 84–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.1.84. Gagne, F., 2009. Building gifts into talents: detailed overview of the DMGT 2.0. In: MacFarlane, B., Stambaugh, T. (Eds.), Leading Change in Gifted Education: The Festschrift of Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska. Prufrock Press, Waco, TX, pp. 61–80. Garmezy, N., 1986. Developmental aspects of children’s responses to the stress of separation and loss. In: Rutter, M., Izard, C.E., Read, P.B. (Eds.), Depression in Young People: Developmental and Clinical Perspectives. Guilford Press, New York, pp. 297–323. Gest, S.D., Reed, M.G.J., Masten, A.S., 1999. Measuring developmental changes in exposure to adversity: a life chart and rating scale approach. Dev. Psychopathol. 11, 171–192. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1017/S095457949900200X. Gould, D., Dieffenbach, K., Moffett, A., 2002. Psychological characteristics and their development in Olympic champions. J. Appl. Sport Psychol. 14, 172–204. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/10413200290103482. Green, J.G., McLaughlin, K.A., Berglund, P.A., Gruber, M.J., Sampson, N.A., Zaslavsky, A.M., et al., 2010. Childhood adversities and adult psychiatric disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication I: associations with first onset of DSM-IV disorders. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 67, 113–123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/ archgenpsychiatry.2009.186. Gucciardi, D.F., Hanton, S., 2016. Mental toughness: critical reflections and future considerations. In: Schinke, R., McGannon, K., Smith, B. (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Sport Psychology. Routledge, New York, pp. 439–448.
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