Abstract
The aim of this research was to study if basketball players’ attributions to explain their personal and their team performance were influenced by the affect induced by victories or defeats after playing a game. Coffee & Rees (2008) proposed four dimensions to be taken into account to assess attributions: Controllability, stability, globality and universality, and develop the CGSU questionnaire to measure these dimensions. Individuals with higher self-efficacy beliefs perceived causes as controllable and/or specific and/or universal. On the contrary, those with lower self-efficacy beliefs perceived causes as less controllable. Our aim was to study if the attributions our participants gave were biased in some extent by the affect infusion induced by winning or losing a game. We used this framework to assess 80 basketball players (14 to 16 years old) from 6 teams (half of them male, the other half, female). All participants filled the CGSU questionnaire and the Achievement Goal Scale for Youth Sports at the beginning of the study. Then, 4 games from each team was recorded and the players were asked about how they assess and explain both their individual and their team performance immediately after finishing the game. The players’ mood was also assessed both after finishing the game and after the next training some days later. Results showed that affect was more intense (positive after a victory in most cases, and negative after being defeated) after playing the game and some moderate effects in players’ attributions were found.Acknowledgments: This study was conducted thanks to grants DEP2011-27282 and EDU2008-01211 Spanish Government granted to the first author.