d upset as well as by more negative adult evaluations, and greater parental pressure to wrestle.
In a study of middle and secondary school soccer players (N=102), Lewthwaite (1990) examined self-esteem and competitive trait anxiety in relation to achievement, cognitive concerns regarding goals, and to feelings (mood) involving a sense of threat to important goals. Findings of the study showed competitive trait anxiety to be related to achievement, to important goals, and to perceived threats to goals; however, self-esteem was not found to be related to any of these measures. This is a somewhat surprising finding, in that if self-esteem and competitive trait anxiety are related to one another, it was reasonable to expect that both of the measures would be related to the study's dependent measures of mood, achievement, and cognitive concerns.
In another study of competitive trait anxiety and self-esteem in relation to sport-related feelings and behaviors, Brustad and Weiss (1987) explored for a relationship between cognitive appraisal processes and the affective characteristics of youth sport involvement. Subjects were 55 boy baseball players and 58 girl softball players, all of whom completed measures of competitive trait anxiety, self-esteem, perceived physical competence, and frequency of evaluative and performance-related worries about athletic competition.
According to the authors, analyses revealed that boys with high levels of competitive trait anxiety reported lower levels of self-esteem and more frequent worries (the measure of mood) about their performance than did their less anxious counterparts.
For the girls, no significant relationships were found between levels of competitive trait anxiety and the cognitive variables. In other words, once again there appears to be a relationship between self-esteem and competitive trait anxiety, albeit only for boys.
Why is it in some studies self-esteem appears...