Personality, passion, self-esteem and psychological well-being among junior elite athletes in Norway

Abstract

Personality research among athletes seems to have obtained less interest in recent years after much focus until the 1990s. This decline was obviously a result of ill conducted “personology” research, and a greater focus on psychological state versus trait in the sport psychology community. The present study explored personality dimensions, as measured by the Junior Temperament and Character Inventory, passion, self-esteem, and well-being among junior elite athletes. In addition, the athletes were compared with non-athletic peers to investigate if they had a personality profile which appears to be more beneficial for athletes. Female athletes scored significantly higher on the personality dimensions Reward Dependence and Cooperativeness, and significantly lower on Self-esteem than their male counterparts. Both obsessive and harmonious passion was found to be more pronounced among those competing at an international level as compared with athletes competing at a local level. In addition, the athlete sample scored significantly higher on Persistence and Self-Directedness and lower on Harm Avoidance than non-athletes. The use of the J-TCI as a measure of personality yielded interesting results, which should be relevant for the sport psychology community and increase our understanding of the underlying factors and mechanisms of elite sport. In future research, the predictive power of personality on especially performance in different sports should be investigated.