ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1561450
The Relationship between Pain and Athletic Identity in Youth Ballet Dancers
Provisionally accepted
- 1Scottish Rite for Children, Dallas, United States
- 2University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, United States
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Abstract Introduction Ballet is considered both an art-form and a sport, intended to evoke an emotion through movement. Pain and the perception of pain is a part of ballet culture. Many adolescent ballet dancers begin training at a young age where musculoskeletal development is occurring congruently with psychological identity formation. Athletic identity is an identity facet defined as the degree an individual identifies with the athlete role. The relationship between pain and athletic identity during adolescence is currently unexplored. Methods Forty-four American female ballet dancers between 10 and 18 years olds participated in a cross-sectional study in 2022 that involved completing surveys to understand the effect of pain on an athlete's relationship with dance. Dancers experiencing pain and dancers not experiencing pain were matched based on specialization level and age. Mann-Whitney U tests were performed to identify significant pain group differences in AIMS measures and dancer characteristics. Results Dancers who reported experiencing pain had higher scores of athletic identity on measures of exclusivity and negative affectivity. Though all dancers trained more than eight months out of the year without taking an offseason, dancers experiencing pain trained significantly more compared to dancers who were not experiencing pain, which may attribute to higher exclusivity identification. Discussion These findings highlight the importance for dancers to reserve time in their training for rest and recovery, especially if taking an offseason is not possible. Additionally, dancer-specific education in coping with injury, pain, or poor performance is essential to support the emotional and physical well-being of dancers.
Keywords: Athletic identity, Ballet dancers, Pain Perception, Adolescent Psychology, identity formation
Received: 15 Jan 2025; Accepted: 21 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Choudhury, Stapleton, Erdman, Gale, Chung and Ulman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sophia Ulman, Scottish Rite for Children, Dallas, United States
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