Learned helplessness is often studied as a consequence of repetitive failure in a performance domain and is usually associated with the experience of uncontrollability over future outcomes. The premise of this review article is first to establish initial support towards the notion of learned helplessness seen in the context of sports performance. Furthermore, the role of performance anxiety and maladaptive perfectionism will be introduced to strengthen the idea that thinking traits impact motor performance especially when these traits moderate the effects of consecutive failure experience. Finally the paper will focus on a typical profile of an athlete who would be susceptible to choking under pressure as an outcome of perceived uncontrollability and performance anxiety. Burnout and potential interventions will be discussed later.

Previous studies reported that mental health and emotion regulation strategies deteriorated in the refugee sample. The main goal of the study was to analyze the mediation effect of emotion regulation strategies as expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal between resilience to helplessness – depression and flourishing. The second aim was to determine to what extent emotion regulation strategies and resilience to helplessness-depression predicted flourishing. Forty-seven Syrian refugees, aged 18-64, who were settled in Istanbul fulfilled the coping competence questionnaire (CCQ), the flourishing scale, and the emotion regulation questionnaire (ERQ). The serial mediation analysis indicated that expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal had a significant indirect mediating effect between resilience to helplessness-depression and flourishing. Multiple regression analysis showed that expressive suppression was a negative predictor of flourishing. However, both cognitive reappraisal and resilience to helplessness – depression were positive predictors of flourishing. Moreover, ERQ, flourishing, and CCQ scales showed good internal reliability consistency scores in the refugee group. The study suggested that improvement in emotion regulation strategies may be a helpful strategy in the therapeutic setting.

On a certain illusory strategy for survival.