Top Highlights

• A factor that has been shown to influence performance in sport is the way athletes cope with stressors they encounter (Lazarus, 2000).
• An athlete’s ability to cope with stress has been shown to be important to success in traditional sport (Lazarus, 2000; Polman, 2012).
• Coping responses have been identified as falling into three common, higher-order dimensions (Nicholls and Polman, 2007): PFC (strategies aimed at changing stressful situation), EFC (strategies to regulate emotions associated with a stressful situation), and AC (physical or cognitive efforts to disengage from the stressor).
• From this 4/6C model, Clough et al. (2002) developed a 48-item Mental Toughness Questionnaire (MTQ-48). While the MTQ-48 has been used extensively in the literature, several research teams have reported equivocal results about its psychometric properties (Gucciardi, 2017). To improve the factorial validity of the MTQ-48, Kawabata et al. (under revi...
• The relationship between MT and the stress and coping process has been researched in traditional sport. A study by Kaiseler et al. (2009) found that higher levels of MT were associated with lower levels of perceived stress and higher levels of emotional control. Furthermore, Nicholls et al. (2008) found that athletes who were more mentally tough us...

Domain