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Coping has been defined as "constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person" (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p. 141). The failure to cope effectively with acute stress during the sport contest may lead to undesirable changes in psychobehavioral processes. Examples include poorer decision-making, misguided attentional focus, less sustained self-regulatory behavior, undesirable levels of anxiety and other self-defeating thoughts and emotions (Anshel, 1990; Anshel, Brown, & Brown, 1993; Krohne, 1993; Hoar, Kowalski, Gaudreau, & Crocker, 2006). For example, Krohne contends that attempting to resolve a stressful situation during the contest that is beyond the competitor's control, or distracts the performer from attending to relevant cues, will inhibit performance and promote stress.
The area of coping with stress in sport has received increased attention by researchers in recent years (e.g., reviews of literature by Anshel, Kim, Kim, Chang, & Eom, 2001; Hoar et al., 2006; Krohne, Egloff, Varner, Burns, Weidner & Ellis, 2000; Richards, 2004). The authors have jointly concluded that the coping process, in particular, an athlete's use of coping strategies, is a function of individual differences in perceived stress intensity. For example, Madden, Summers, and Brown (1990), in their study of basketball players, found that athletes reporting high perceived stress increasingly used effort, resolve, and social support-seeking as means to cope with stressful events, as compared to athletes reporting low perceived stress. In another study, Rawstorne, Anshel, and Caputi (2000) found that athletes' coping styles were a function of the type of stressor if the stressor was perceived as highly intense. One conceptual framework in the coping style literature that has received increased attention in recent years is approach and avoidance.
Approach coping, also referred to as sensitization, engagement, vigilance, attention, and monitoring, is typically defined as an orientation towards the stressful event, with the person's active attempts at resolving and managing the stressor (Krohne, 1993, 1996). For example, an athlete with an approach coping style tends to respond to a "bad" call from the referee by questioning or arguing against the call, or perhaps seeking clarification or more information about the call. On the other hand, avoidance coping, also called desensitization, disengagement, repression, and blunting, is an orientation that results in the physical or psychological withdrawal from the source of threat. For example, using the "bad" call as the stressful event, an athlete using an avoidance coping style prefers to discount the importance of the incident, or ignore the call, altogether.
In an early conceptual paper, Roth and Cohen (1986) provided guidelines for using the approach and avoidance coping framework, with implications for competitive sport. For example, avoidance coping is usually preferred following a "had" call from the referee, in which the athlete is required to quickly address the next task at hand. Taking the time to argue the call when the game is in progress runs counter to optimal attentional focusing, especially given the low level of control the athlete can exert in response to the referee. However, an opponent's successful performance might warrant an approach coping style in which the athlete becomes better informed about his or her actions that explains the penalty, thereby preventing a reoccurrence of the problem.
In support of Roth and Cohen's (1986) recommendations, Krohne and Hindel (1988) found that successful elite table tennis players experienced markedly less anxiety and superior performance following performance errors when using an avoidant, not approach, coping style. Along these lines, in another experiment of competitive table tennis players, Anshel and Anderson (2002) found that approach coping was accompanied by greater negative affect and poorer performance accuracy, as opposed to avoidance coping. These outcomes support Roth and Cohen's contention that avoidance coping is preferred when performing an "open" motor skill (i.e., performed in an unstable environment), such as table tennis. Roth and Cohen describe approach coping as time-consuming and distractive. The performer attends to the stressor, as opposed to the task at hand, which is deleterious to favorable performance outcomes. Identifying the use of approach and avoidance coping styles among elite competitive athletes has been apparently neglected among athletes in the People's Republic of China.
One limitation in previous coping in sport research has been the interchangeable use of the concepts coping style and coping strategies. A person's coping style may be viewed as a disposition that explains or predicts his or her selection of specific coping strategies when responding to certain stressful situations (Carver, Seheier & Weintraub, 1989; Endler & Parker, 1990), or as a tendency to select certain types of coping (Richards, 2004). Coping styles can reflect situation-specific measures, that is, the repeated use of similar coping tendencies following one type of stressor (e.g., making an error), or it can consist of cross-situational coping tendencies, in which the person uses a similar coping technique following different types of stressful events (Parker & Endler, 1996). Coping strategies, on the other hand, consist of specific cognitive processes or actions that serve to reduce the intensity of perceived stress. Strategies are situational; they consist of what reflections of specific stressful situations. Coping strategies reflect a particular coping style. Coping styles are more predictable than strategies because they reflect dispositions, preferences, and tendencies, and therefore, are more likely than strategies to reflect an athlete's gender or culture (Hoedaya & Anshel, 2003).
The importance of acknowledging these differences is based on the assertion that "people develop habitual ways of dealing with stress and that these habits, or coping styles, can influence their reactions in new situations" (Carver & Scheier, 1994). The authors contend that coping styles may influence situational coping outcomes, which in turn, has significant implications for developing stress management programs. In an illustration of this common problem throughout the sport and non-sport coping literature, Crocker, Kowalski, and Graham (1998), in their extensive review of coping in sport literature, failed to distinguish between coping styles and strategies. Separating coping styles from the use of coping strategies was not addressed.
Skinner, Edge, Altman, and Sherwood (2003) suggest a "top-down approach" in the study of coping. This consists of identifying "families of coping" from higher order categories (e.g., approach, avoidance) that can be...
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