Sport injury psychology: An overview and introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Welcome to this special issue of the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology on Sports Injury Psychology. We introduce this special issue in the knowledge that just over 20 years ago, Britton Brewer was tasked with a similar introduction to write as Guest Editor of the 1998 special issue (Brewer, 1998). At that point in time, Brewer remarked that a special issue was timely given the expanding research interest in sports injury psychology and broadening of the domain to include topics, such as adherence to rehabilitation and interventions to prevent injury. Despite growing interest in the psychology of injury, Brewer highlighted the need for further research, suggesting “there is obviously a great deal more to be learned about the role of psychological factors in the occurrence of and recovery from sports injuries” (p. 2). The previous special edition, therefore, acted as a call to action, challenging researchers to traverse the sports injury landscape, building upon existing knowledge. Nearly 25 years later this special edition opens up a timely question asked by many a traveler, “are we there yet?” As ever, the answer to this question is complex and it would be naïve to provide a simple answer. Yet, with this in mind, we propose that it is both timely and important to engage in critical dialogue. We suggest this because sports injury psychology is an area of research that has continued to flourish and diversify in the applied sports psychology literature. Following the publication of the 1998 special edition, 23 articles with injury in the title have been published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology alone. These articles have continued to expand our understanding of the emotional responses to injury (e.g., Tracey, 2003), and provided new approaches to working with injured athletes, such as mindfulness (Ivarsson et al., 2015) and gratitude (Salim & Wadey, 2021) and have considered how injury impacts and is impacted by a broad range of individuals, such as coaches (Podlog & Eklund, 2007), parents (Podlog et al., 2012), and teams (Surya et al., 2015). Thus the volume and breadth of sports injury research have certainly increased, but alongside this, we might question whether this research is also driven in diverse theoretical and methodological directions. Furthermore, there is no doubt that this flourishing research area has developed new knowledge, but is this knowledge enough to enhance the work we (as psychologists, physiotherapists, coaches, and other supporters) do with injured athletes? Our aim in this special issue is to present five articles, each of which challenges our current thinking on sports injury psychology in a different way. We open the special issue with