PREDICTING COGNITIVE ANXIETY IN YOUTH SOCCER PLAYERS

1011 The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate Roberts (1986) contention that competitive stress in youth sport settings is a function of the dispositional achievement goals and perceptions of ability held by the athlete. The secondary purpose of this study was to explore relationships between a measure of perceived threat and select social cognitive variables associated with achievement motivation. Sixty-four youth soccer players completed measures assessing dispositional achievement goals, perceived threat, cognitive anxiety, perceived ability, self-esteem, and perceived sport importance. Bivariate correlation analysis indicated that ego-orientation was positively related to cognitive anxiety (r = .45, p<.001), perceived threat (r = .66, p<.001), and perceived importance of youth sport (r = .25, p<.05). Conversely, task-orientation was positively correlated with perceived importance of youth sport (r = .42, p<.001) and self-esteem (r = .57, p<.001), and negatively correlated with perceived threat (r = −.43, p<.001) and cognitive anxiety (r = −.43, p<.001). Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was employed to assess the unique contributions of achievement goals to the prediction of cognitive anxiety. After accounting for perceived ability, ego-orientation uniquely added 22% (p<.001) and task-orientation accounted for 9% (p<.05) of the cognitive anxiety variance explained. Collectively, these data suggest that dispositional achievement goals make important and unique contributions to the prediction of cognitive anxiety in young athletes, and render some support for Roberts (1986) contentions regarding the source of competitive stress in youth sport settings. Consequently, further investigation of cognitive anxiety using an achievement motivation framework appears warrented.