Basic Psychological Needs in the Face of Achievement Vulnerability: A Study in Young Team Athletes

Abstract

The susceptibility of athletes to experience of emotional and psychological difficulties arising from the pressure and expectations associated with achieving and maintaining high performance can become a vulnerability in the desire to achieve success in sport. This study aims to investigate the protective value in the perception of satisfaction in basic psychological needs against the vulnerability that perfectionism generates in the appearance of reactivity linked to fear of failure. A cross-sectional, relational, and semi-randomized research design was used, applying perfectionism, fear of failure, and basic psychological needs measures adapted to both the competitive sports context and the Spanish language in a sample of 372 young Spanish athletes, under descriptive analyses and predictive models. The results showed that as the age of the participants increased, the indicators of perfectionism and fear of failure decreased, with no gender differences. The results offer and confirm the positive relationships between the dimensions of perfectionism and fear of making mistakes (where processes such as self-devaluation and fear of failing the people that participants deemed as important to them are intertwined). The perception of satisfaction of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, social relationships, and competence emerges as protective factors that mediate the perfectionism–fear of failure relationship. On the other hand, discrepancies are shown between the perfectionist dimensions concerning the relationships with the BPNs, describing certain sources of vulnerability, although there are adjustments of mental effort and discomfort in the young athletes. The conclusions offer the opportunity to investigate the aspects that facilitate the emergence of fear of failure in young athletes, mainly the performance of coaches connected to the emergence of patterns in pursuit of perfection.