Performance in high pressure situations highly depends on how athletes respond to failure. This is particularly critical in dyadic teams, where the performance failure of one athlete immediately affects the entire team. In beach volleyball, where the performances of both athletes are highly interdependent, such failure may have even more extreme consequences. We explored how 23 junior elite beach volleyball athletes experienced team-related failure and how they coped with this failure under pressure by conducting semi structured interviews and using Reflexive Thematic Analysis to analyse the data. Results indicated that individual performance failure of one athlete often seemed to trigger an attentional shift and increased perceived pressure in the teammate, frequently resulting in a subsequent decline in their performance as well. Athletes described emotional responses and both individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies as central to managing failure and preventing further performance deterioration. Notably, athletes tended to offer the type of support they themselves would have preferred in that moment, which was often perceived as intrusive or unhelpful by their partners. Ineffective regulation was described as an underlying mechanism through which an initial failure (e.g., loss of points) escalated into losing a set and, ultimately, the match and/or following matches. Applied implications include implementing a structured “teammate talk”, in which athletes proactively discuss helpful and unhelpful support and regulation strategies prior to competition in order to prepare for critical performance situations.

"Team performance crisis" describes the prolonged underperformance of a sport team over the course of multiple competitions. To explore and understand the experience of such a crisis, we employed a grounded-theory methodology to contribute to an indepth understanding of team performance crises in professional soccer by interviewing 17 male soccer players from professional European leagues. The persistent self-perpetuating cycle of unmet expectations on different levels, driving the team crisis, evolved as a core category of our grounded theory. Based on these expectations, teams enter a crisis through a vulnerable state (i.e., pressure to perform well), followed by a trigger (i.e., nonfulfilment of expectations). The trigger negatively impacts teamrelated factors (e.g., team atmosphere and collective efficacy), and the deficient regulation of pressure, atmosphere, and unpleasant emotions in the team leads to continued negative results. External structural factors (e.g., club officials, fans, and media) reinforce the development and maintenance of the performance crisis.

The strain of intense competition at the very highest performance levels can sometimes compromise athletes' health. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the associations between burnout and mental health in elite athletes is an important endeavor in sport psychology. The goal of the present research was to examine how selected moderators are associated with burnout and mental health in elite athletes. One hundred and eighty-one elite athletes completed a survey assessing potential burnout, coach identity leadership, and mental health. The results showed that if athletes perceived their coach to be engaging in identity leadership and they were performing in a team sport, this buffered the impact of burnout on their mental health. At the same time, competing at a higher competitive level and being trained by a coach for a longer period (more than 2.8 seasons) increased the effect of burnout on athletes' mental health. This suggests that elite athletes who are involved in individual sports and who have long relationships with their coaches may be particularly vulnerable to mental health problems.

The collective collapse of a sport team is typically accompanied by unpleasant emotions and their transfer between team members. Strategies to regulate these emotions may determine whether a team collapse unfolds in a team. Applying a pragmatist interpretivist paradigm, we explored emotion regulation strategies applied by sport teams in team collapse versus performance recovery situations and used video recordings of both situations to stimulate focus group interviews and conduct written observations. Twenty-two athletes of four sport teams (cricket, volleyball, and European handball) and three observers from the same sports participated. We used reflexive thematic analysis to analyze the data. Results showed that applied emotion regulation strategies differed between team collapse and performance recovery situations with fewer and less effective strategies used in team collapse situations. This may be due to an emotional shutdown and/or the avoidance of emotion regulation. Future research developing and testing prevention and intervention strategies is needed.

The collective collapse of a team's performance is typically triggered by a critical event, such as performance failure or scoring of the opponent, evoking unhelpful emotions and their transfer between team members. These changes in emotional states also affect athletes' cognitive processes and behaviors, maintaining the team collapse and prohibiting the team from recovering its performance. However, not every critical event and the emotions that accompany it evoke a team collapse, which is why athletes' emotion regulation may play a key role in determining the performance outcome of a critical event for the team. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted a retrospective-online survey study with 69 team sport athletes, assessing the emotion regulation strategies they applied in past team collapse vs. performance recovery situations, and how these strategies impacted them. We used quantitative measures to assess experienced emotions, individual and interpersonal emotion regulation, and depleting effects of emotion regulation in both situations and an open-ended qualitative question to assess interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in more detail. Athletes reported more unhelpful emotions and the increased use of affect-worsening and performance hindering individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in the team collapse compared to the performance recovery situation. Athletes further indicated higher levels of effort regulating emotions and higher depletion levels in the team collapse situation. Our results highlight the importance of individual and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in team collapse situations and indicate the use of more effective and less depleting strategies for sport teams to mitigate against a team collapse. Lay summary: This correlational study explored experienced emotions, individual and interpersonal emotion regulation, and its depleting effects in team collapse situations vs. situations where teams recovered their performance after a critical event. Athletes used inefficient, affect-worsening strategies, experienced more unhelpful emotions, and felt more depleted in team collapse vs. performance recovery situations.

The experience of anxiety around a competition may be one of the most prominent reasons for elite athletes to seek psychological consulting. However, competitions are merely one source of anxiety in elite sport. Others are, for example, fear of injury or social physique anxiety. Anxiety strongly affects athletes’ mental health and well-being. This chapter will address sources of anxiety in elite sport, explain the emergence of anxiety, discuss the state- or trait-like nature of anxiety and show how it relates to performance, well-being, and the development of mental health issues. Current theoretical understandings and models are presented, which serve as the basis for assessment for research and applied purposes. Personal (like personality traits or age) and situational (like coaching style or public scrutiny) risk factors and potential mechanisms for experiencing high levels of anxiety will be discussed. Furthermore, it will be shown how these factors can interfere with athletes’ well-being and increase their vulnerability to depression, anxiety, and stress. The diverse areas of anxiety make simple, practical implications difficult but different prevention and intervention strategies as well as directions for future research and practice will be presented.

The construct of "choking under pressure" is concerned with the phenomenon of unexpected, sudden, and significant declines in individual athletes' performances in important situations and has received empirical attention in the field of sport psychology. Although a number of theories about the reasons for the occurrence of choking under pressure exist and several intervention approaches have been developed, underlying mechanisms of choking are still under debate and the effectiveness of existing interventions remains contested. These sudden performance declines also occur in team sport. "Collective sport team collapse," which describes the situation when an entire sport team underperforms significantly within an important competitive situation, has received less empirical attention, in comparison to individual choking research. While there are a few studies that have investigated causes of collective team collapse, understandably, there has been limited empirical investigation of preventative and intervention strategies. Although the two constructs appear to share several similar characteristics and mechanisms, research has not yet examined the conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and practical links between choking under pressure and collective sport team collapse. In this review article, we seek to examine these similarities and differences and identify new ways of thinking about future interventions. Furthermore, current empirical understandings in the field of choking under pressure and collective sport team collapse are presented and the most effective intervention approaches for both constructs are introduced. On the basis of this examination, we modestly make some initial recommendations for sport psychological practitioners and future research.

Shared leadership is an emergent team phenomenon, emphasizing that it originates from the interaction of all team members. However, previous athlete leadership studies have focused on the individual level, omitting the role of team member interaction. In order to develop shared athlete leadership as an emergent team phenomenon, we utilized a solution-focused brief therapy paradigm, which uses coconstruction to engender change for social systems (e.g., sport teams). Sixty athletes from six sport teams (three in the experimental condition and three in the control condition) participated in a mixed-methods experimental design consisting of parallel quantitative and qualitative data collection along with a combined interpretation of these data. The quantitative results support a difference in development of shared leadership between groups, while the qualitative analysis resulted in four themes that indicate changes in interactional patterns and relational structures within the teams.

Abstract This chapter reviews current choking under pressure (“choking”) literature while offering questions to advance theory, methodology, and interventions. Although definitions of choking are elusive, psychological predictors helpful, and theoretical explanations existent, there is limited understanding of the (neuro)physiological underpinnings of choking. By using mobile recording devices, the assessment of (neuro)physiological and neuromuscular activity under pressure could shed light on choking mechanisms. Choking interventions are aimed at either promoting task-relevant attention or familiarizing performers with pressure, which improve performance under pressure but vary in their effectiveness. Thus, choking interventions could be tailored to specific sports and/or personalities. Choking can also influence an entire team, referred to as collective sport team collapse. Social factors appear to play a key role, indicating that team collapse is more than the simultaneous choking of individuals. We offer questions to advance this burgeoning field but caution that further research is needed before considering team interventions.

Dynamically squeezing the left hand (left hand dynamic handgrip) has been shown to be effective in preventing choking under pressure in right-handers in a variety of sports. The current study assessed the effectiveness of the left hand dynamic handgrip in preventing a loss of accuracy of tennis serves in competitive situations. Twenty right-handed highly skilled junior athletes performed eight tennis serves at a target without pressure (pre-test), followed by eight serves under pressure (post-test). Ten of the participants conducted the left hand dynamic handgrip prior to the post-test, while the other ten performed an equivalent handgrip with their right hand. The serving accuracy of the group performing the handgrip with their right hand decreased significantly from pre- to post-test, while the accuracy of the left hand dynamic handgrip group remained stable. The results indicate the left hand dynamic handgrip to be effective in preventing reduced accuracy of the tennis serve in competition situations as a form of choking under pressure. This technique could easily be integrated into tennis players' serving routines and promote stable match performance in competitions.

Problem: The skin is exposed to numerous stresses during sport. In addition to infection-related or allergic triggers, the development of sport-associated skin diseases depends on the discipline practiced and can be caused by mechanical stressors, thermal damage, and UV radiation. Methods: This review intends to give an overview of study results on the incidence and prevalence of skin diseases in competitive athletes. Publications describing case reports of the outbreak of a specific skin disease within a small cohort of athletes of a defined discipline were included as well as publications comparing the incidence of dermatoses between different disciplines based on large study cohorts.Results: Most studies focus on the analysis of the ocurrence of certain skin diseases in athletes of only one defined discipline, in most cases athletes performing sports with close body contact. Hardly any studies deal with dermatoses in competitive athletes among multiple disciplines. This review displays the occurrence of infectious, allergic, traumatic, UV-induced, and sebaceous dermatoses in competitive athletes by taking different disciplines into account.Discussion: Depending on the training environment, flow of movement, climatic influences and other factors, certain skin diseases occur frequently in athletes of specific disciplines.Key Words: High-Performance Athlete, Skin Disease, Training, Specific Disciplines