Perceived Motivational Climates and Doping Intention in Adolescent Athletes: The Mediating Role of Moral Disengagement and Sportspersonship

Abstract

Doping is an important issue in competitive sports and poses potentially irreversible consequences to athletes. Understanding the psychological process underlying antecedents and doping intention will inform policy and prevention. This study aimed to test the psychosocial mechanisms of doping in adolescent athletes using an integrated model. In this model, we examined the associations of perceived motivational climate (i.e., task-involving and ego-involving), moral variables (i.e., moral disengagement and sportspersonship), and attitudinal variables (i.e., perceived pros/cons of doping and perceived cons of not doping) with doping intention. We further investigated whether the moral variables mediated the relationship between perceived motivational climate and doping intention. A cross-sectional survey was employed in the present study. Six hundred and fifteen Chinese adolescent athletes (mean age = 15.68 ± 1.67 years) completed questionnaires measuring demographic information and the variables mentioned previously. Structural equation modeling showed that the hypothesized model had a good fit and explained 64.1% of the variance in doping intention. Task-involving motivational climate indicated both directly and indirectly negative associations with doping intention via sportspersonship. The ego-involving motivational climate was positively associated with doping intention via moral disengagement. Among perceived pros/cons of doping and perceived cons of not doping, both perceived cons of doping and cons of not doping were positively associated with doping intention with a small effect size. This study confirmed the roles of tasking- and ego-involving motivational climates, moral variables, and attitudinal variables on doping intention. These research findings may provide new insights for the future of intention-based doping prevention programmes.

Moral Disengagement in Youth Athletes: A Narrative Review

“…Moreover, apart from the health risks, doping is a moral issue [ 59 , 60 ]. Framing doping as a moral problem allows one to examine the influence of morality on the likelihood of engaging in doping behaviour [ 19 ]. Barkoukis and Elbe [ 61 ] analysed both the moral and ethical implications of doping, concluding that morality has been mainly framed in a socio-cognitive approach.…”

“…One of the possible understandings of motivational climate in sports is the distinction between a task-involving climate, where the athletes are provided with a clear rationale for tasks and non-controlling competence feedback, and ego-involving climate, where competence feedback is provided and the athletes define success as outperforming others and winning [ 67 ]. A study by Guo, Liang, Baker and Mao [ 19 ] examined the association among perceived motivational climate (i.e., task-involving and ego-involving), moral variables (i.e., moral disengagement and sportspersonship), and attitudes towards doping with doping intention. The results showed that the task-involving motivational climate was negatively associated with doping intention through sportspersonship, while the ego-involving climate was positively related to doping intention through moral disengagement.…”

“…Concerning the sports field, in the last decades moral disengagement has been extensively studied in relation to antisocial and aggressive behaviour [ 15 , 16 , 17 ] and doping [ 18 , 19 ]. Several reviews have pointed out the mechanisms of moral disengagement [ 11 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ], and the latest contribution in the sports context was in 2011 [ 24 ], where the authors reported the need for further research in the role of regulatory emotions such as anticipatory guilt [ 9 ].…”

Annual banned‐substance review: Analytical approaches in human sports drug testing 2020/2021

“…The fact that clean athletes experience negative consequences from doped competitors has been established and corroborated in various studies, 1 and substantial efforts utilizing numerous different scientific approaches have been employed and assessed to allow for a better understanding and tackling of the issue of doping and, likewise, the spirit‐of‐sport construct in relation to clean sport 2 . While the knowledge about the prevalence of doping in elite (competitive) sport was described as being deduced from disparate evidence, 3 new insights into aspects contributing to and influencing especially adolescent athletes concerning their attitude towards doping were obtained, with sportspersonship and moral disengagement representing the central oppositions 4,5 . Also, the role of ergogenic and medical sport supplements as a catalyst or initiator towards future doping activities was once more thematized 6 .…”

Comparison of emotional intelligence in athletes with doping history in comparison with general population

“…Emotional intelligence is correlated with pleasant emotions in optimal and dysfunctional performances with lower scores on the self-report emotional intelligence scale appearing to experience intense unpleasant emotions before dysfunctional performance [5]. There is a positive linear relationship between emotional factors and body performance [6]. Emotional states are crucial and decisive factors in cognitive and perceptual functions [7].…”