ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1617692
This article is part of the Research TopicMental Health in Recreational and Elite SportsView all 12 articles
Mental Toughness as a Mediator Between Sports Psychological Skills and Athlete Burnout: A Buffering Model
Provisionally accepted
Zhao Zhang1*
Shaoran Yu2- 1Chengdu Sport University, Chengdu, China
- 2Deyang Vocational College of Technology and Trade, Deyang, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Athlete burnout is a critical issue in competitive sports, yet the mechanisms linking sports psychological skills to burnout remain under-explored. This study has proposed a mental toughness-mediated buffering model to address this gap. Data from 341 collegiate athletes were analyzed using hierarchical regression and Hayes' PROCESS marco 3.5 (Model 4) with 5000 bootstrap samples for mediation effects. Key findings have shown that:(1)Sports psychological skills negatively predicted all three burnout dimensions (reduced sense of accomplishment, devaluation, and emotional/physical exhaustion);(2)Mental toughness partially mediated the effects of sports psychological skills on devaluation (β= -.135, 95%CI [-.249, -.026]) and reduced sense of accomplishment ).(3)However, no significant mediation effect was observed for emotional/physical exhaustion, suggesting distinct pathological mechanisms for this dimension.These results have advanced existing burnout theories by demonstrating dimension-specific mediation pathways, highlighting the need for targeted mental toughness interventions to mitigate devaluation and reduced sense of accomplishment in collegiate athletes.
Keywords: Mental toughness, Athlete burnout, sports psychological skills, Mediation analysis, Collegiate athletes
Received: 24 Apr 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang and Yu. 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: Zhao Zhang, Chengdu Sport University, Chengdu, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.