Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

2000). Unfortunately, this theory has not been tested adequately so far. Indeed, few
researchers have sought to identify the precise theoretical mechanisms by which
psychological factors like stress influence athletes’ vulnerability to injury. Nevertheless,
as we learned earlier in this chapter, there is evidence that certain kinds of life stress are
associated with athletic injury. For example, J.M.Williams (2001) observed that athletes
who had experienced a relatively high degree of stressful life events were between two
and five times more likely to be injured than were athletes who had experienced
relatively low levels of such stress. Let us now evaluate the cognitive appraisal model of
injury reaction in more detail.

Critical evaluation of the cognitive appraisal model of injury reaction

From a cursory inspection of relevant research literature, it seems that the cognitive
appraisal approach to injury reaction has generated more research than its predecessor,
the grief stages model. This research may be classified into two categories (Brewer et al.,
2002): studies of the aetiology of injuries and research on the role of psychological
factors in people’s recovery from injuries. These two strands of research converge on a
number of conclusions.
First, as predicted by the generic model, stressful life events are associated with
increased vulnerability to injury. For example, Bramwell, Masuda, Wagner and Holmes
(1975) discovered that the risk of injury to American football players grew in direct
proportion to the amount of stressful life events that they had experienced. Similar
findings were reported by Cryan and Alles (1983). The results of these studies should be
interpreted cautiously, however, because they used retrospective data collection
procedures which are vulnerable to memory biases and other cognitive distortions.
Second, there is evidence that the way in which athletes think about, or try to make sense
of, their injuries is related to their reactions to the trauma (see also Chapter 2 for a
discussion of attributional processes in athletes). Specifically, athletes who attribute their
injuries to internal factors (e.g., “it was entirely my fault”) which have global
consequences (e.g., “this injury has ruined my life”) tend to experience more distress than
do athletes with more optimistic explanatory styles. By contrast, athletes’ adherence to
physical rehabilitation programmes is associated with attributions to stable and personally
controllable factors (e.g., “if I work hard on my exercises every day, I can get back to full
fitness soon”). Third, research on the relationship between athletes’ coping strategies for
stress and the speed and/or success of their physical rehabilitation have produced mixed
results. Thus Udry (1997) explored the relationship between injured athletes’ coping
skills, the social support which they received from others, and their adherence to post-
surgery rehabilitation programmes. The injury studied in this research was a cruciate
ligament rupture. Results showed that although “instrumental” coping strategies (e.g.,
attempting to locate as much information as possible about the injury) were related to
adherence, social support was not associated with any rehabilitation outcome measures.
Despite receiving reasonable empirical support, cognitive appraisal models of injury
reaction have at least two notable limitations. First, these models may be more
appropriate in describing athletes’ reactions to acute than to chronic injuries
(J.M.Williams, 2001). To explain, whereas the former injuries are usually caused by
sudden and potentially stressful incidents, the latter have unknown causes and are

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