Psychological Aspects of Sport-Injury Rehabilitation: A Developmental Perspective.

Twenty years ago, a sports medicine colleague invited me to give a presentation at the annual meeting of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association held in Newport Beach, CA. He specifically asked me to speak on the ‘‘psychology of the injured athlete’’ because athletic trainers were clamoring for more information about the elusive mental issues facing individuals recovering from injury and returning fully to competition. Although I was unfamiliar with the literature on the psychological aspects of sport injury, the opportunity to return to one of my favorite places and the challenge of pulling together a scholarly article on a new topic were intriguing enough for me to enthusiastically say ‘‘yes’’ to the invitation. However, when I got organized to do my usual exhaustive library search for relevant articles to guide me, I came up with little more than a few descriptive articles on the injury-prone athlete and personality types that may predispose individuals to injury. I scrambled to pull together an article that would be ‘‘true’’ to the psychological literature and practical for athletic trainers working with injured athletes. I settled upon approaching the topic using the psychological stress model, couching injury as a stressor and delving into the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences of injury.1 That was then. Today, 20 years later, the theoretical and empirical knowledge base on psychological issues related to athletic injury is considerably more substantive, sophisticated, and definitive.2–5 Moreover, this research reveals information about successful interventions that are likely to make a difference in participants’ healthy return to sport involvement. It is both fortunate and satisfying to see how far ‘‘psychology of the injured athlete’’ has come from conceptual, empirical, and applied perspectives. Still, given the volume and severity of injuries that occur in any given year, the quest for continued knowledge about maximizing injured athletes’ mental recovery and hastening their return to a physically active lifestyle is a work in progress. One of the sorely neglected areas in athletic-injury psychology is age-related differences in antecedents and consequences of injury.5 Most of the researchers to date have investigated injury factors in collegiate athletes or young adult recreational participants. We know from developmental sport psychology that children, adolescents, and young, middle, and older adults differ in their self-perceptions, social influences, emotional responses, motivations, and self-regulation skills relative to physical activity and sport involvement.6 It is only reasonable to extrapolate, then, that such individual differences and social-environmental influences are also salient when considering factors related to athletic-injury rehabilitation. I congratulate the authors of the articles in this section for tackling issues related to adolescent sport-injury rehabilitation. These articles are a good start in forging deeper into age-related factors in the psychology of injury. I agree with Brewer7 when he says, ‘‘I hope that this collection of articles will serve as a springboard for further developmental inquiry on psychological aspects of sport injury . . . ’’ To help stimulate further developmental inquiry, I will (1) briefly overview what it means to take a developmental perspective, (2) highlight desirable common themes among the articles, and (3) offer recommendations for future empirical inquiry on developmental athletic-injury psychology.