TMT in the Face of Athletic Injuries

Abstract

The mortality salience hypothesis of terror management theory (Greenberg et al., 1986) states that when humans are faced with reminders of death, there is an increased need for structures that protect us from death-related reminders. Based on the theory, self-esteem is a sense of “personal value” created by beliefs through an individual’s cultural worldview to protect from one’s concern with mortality (Greenberg et al., 1986). The current study investigates the relationship between different athletic injuries (i.e., sports-related or non-sports-related injuries) and athletes’ self-esteem following reminders of death. An athlete’s injuries can heavily influence their self-esteem, especially when an injury was acquired during a game versus outside the playing field. If an athlete’s self-esteem is closely tied to being an athlete, and this self-esteem protects against concerns about death, then an injury will be particularly damaging when death is made salient. To test this, participants will be randomly assigned to think about death or a dental pain control questionnaire. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of two articles regarding professional athlete injuries, where one athlete was injured during a game and the other injury outside of a game environment. Our dependent measures will be how much importance they place on being an athlete (versus other aspects of their identity) through an athlete rating scale which will determine their level of athleticism. This study hypothesizes that participants will rate athletes with sports-related injuries as having higher self-esteem as well as rating them more positively, than those with injuries outside of performance. This study mainly allows us to bridge the social and sports psychology gap.

Details

Session 2

3:00pm – 4:30pm

Grand Salon