Resilience in sports through the lens of complex systems

Studying resilience in sports contributes to understanding who can maintain good performance and who may break down. So far, researchers have mostly attempted to find the components that explain resilience. Amongst others, proposed personality trait-components are hardiness, emotion-regulation, extraversion, self-efficacy, and self-esteem, and psychological process-components are motivation, confidence, focus, optimism, stress appraisals, self-regulation strategies, and perceived social support (e.g. Fletcher & Sarkar, 2012). Given this long list, research increasingly suggests that resilience is complex and cannot be reduced to specific components. Accordingly, there is a major quest for a more holistic approach to (a) quantify resilience, and (b) understand the mechanism underlying resilience (e.g. Fletcher & Sarkar, 2012; Hill, Den Hartigh, De Jonge, Meijer, & Van Yperen, 2018; Pincus, Kiefer, & Beyer, 2018). In this talk I aim to outline a new theoretical, holistic perspective on resilience. More specifically, I will explain how a complex systems perspective provides a theoretical and methodological framework to advance insights into athletes’ resilience. Furthermore, I will focus on the necessity of studying time-series of psychological and performance variables. By analysing time-series it is possible to accurately capture the process of returning to the previous level of (psychological) functioning, the defining feature of resilience. Besides, by using novel statistics (e.g. a complexity index) it is possible to say something about an athlete’s adaptability, a key ingredient of resilience. Altogether the theoretical perspective outlined in this presentation may provide new tools necessary to measure and improve resilience in athletes