collegiate athletes

Background Multidimensional perfectionism theory distinguishes ambitious personal standards from evaluative concerns, but concern over mistakes and doubts about actions may exhibit different prospective associations with competitive functioning. This study tested whether general anxiety symptoms assessed shortly before competition carried distinct indirect associations from these two perfectionism dimensions to post-competition functioning and performance. Methods In this three-wave prospective study, 620 collegiate athletes completed item-level measures of personal standards, concern over mistakes, and doubts about actions at baseline. General anxiety symptoms were assessed with the DASS-21 Anxiety subscale 24–48 h before a target competition; flow, study-specific subjective choking, self-rated performance, coach-rated performance, and a harmonized objective performance indicator were assessed within 24 h afterward. A Bayesian ordinal latent-variable partial mediation model adjusted for personal standards, sex, age, competitive level, years in sport, and starter status. Multiple sensitivity analyses evaluated the robustness of the findings. Results Concern over mistakes strongly predicted greater anxiety symptoms (beta = 0.609, 95% highest-posterior-density interval [0.472, 0.744]), whereas doubts about actions did not (beta = 0.077, [−0.072, 0.218]). Greater anxiety symptoms predicted lower flow, greater subjective choking, and poorer performance across self-, coach-, and objectively indexed outcomes. Anxiety-related indirect associations from concern over mistakes were supported for flow (beta = −0.225), choking (beta = 0.275), self-rated performance (beta = −0.128), and objective performance (beta = −0.148), but not clearly for coach ratings. No indirect interval for doubts about actions excluded zero, although doubts retained direct associations with all five outcomes. Findings were stable across prior, complete-case, indicator-treatment, external-performance, longer-chain, and bipolar-functioning sensitivity analyses. Flow and subjective choking showed substantial overlap; bifactor results indicated that most of their common variance reflected a general competitive-functioning dimension. Conclusion Concern over mistakes demonstrated prospective indirect associations with competitive functioning through general anxiety symptoms assessed before competition and with lower flow, greater subjective choking, and poorer self-rated and objective performance. Mistake-related threat was linked to competitive functioning partly through pre-competition anxiety symptoms, whereas doubts about actions were associated mainly through processes not captured by the general anxiety measure. The findings support treating the two evaluative-concern dimensions as related but psychologically distinct.

This study aims to explore the moderated mediation mechanism of sport confidence and coaching style in the relationship between competitive state anxiety and perceived performance among Chinese elite collegiate basketball athletes. Specifically, data were collected from 315 valid participants across 15 universities in Northeast China using validated scales, and SPSS 26.0 with PROCESS Macro (Model 7) and bootstrap (5,000 samples) were employed for analysis. Results indicated that competitive state anxiety significantly negatively affected perceived performance. Further analysis revealed that sport confidence mediated this relationship. The moderated mediation test showed that coaching style dimensions differentially regulated the path: the indices of moderated mediation for Training and Instruction, Democratic Behavior, Social Support, and Positive Feedback were significant, indicating these supportive dimensions attenuated the detrimental effect of anxiety on sport confidence. In contrast, Autocratic Behavior failed to moderate the process. Collectively, competitive state anxiety is negatively associated with perceived performance in this population, with sport confidence emerging as a key mediator. Notably, the four constructive coaching style dimensions—not the overall style—buffer the first stage of mediation by weakening the negative association between anxiety and confidence. These results underscore sport confidence as a critical mediator and highlight the need to foster confidence and adopt supportive coaching to mitigate anxiety’s adverse effects on perceived performance.