A Sport and Exercise Psychology Perspective on Stress

My purpose is to introduce the psychological perspective (or perspectives) on stress. In doing so, I will focus on conceptual models or frameworks that guide sport and exercise psychology work on stress, leaving the details of the research findigs and implications to the later papers (Berger, 1994; Dishman, 1994; Wrisberg, 1994). Rather than detailed research, this paper presents a framework or context for those subsequent papers. To the sport and exercise psychologist, stress is neither an event (stressor), a physiological response, nor a stressor-response chain. All those concepts miss the key psychological component--the individual, and more specifically, the individual's perceptions and cognitions. Stress is what you think it is. Thought, or cognition, is the key element differentiating a psychological approach from some others. The following illustration from Spielberger's (1989) work captures the key aspects of most psychological models: