An Implicit Association Test for Assessing Athlete Burnout

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was adapted to measure athlete burnout by assessing associations of training words/pictures (vs.daily-life words/pictures) with negative (vs.positive) athlete burnout words.Study 1 showed that the IAT-Burnout exhibited good retest consistency.Study 2 revealed that the IAT-Burnout was unaffected by a faking instruction.Study 3 examined the validities of implicit and explicit measures and showed that the IAT-Burnout has a weak correlation with explicit burnout measures, but was related to the sport motivation and competition satisfaction.Study 4 found that coach-rated indicators of competition performance were predicted by the IAT.Taken together, these studies show that the IAT-Burnout is a reliable measure that is able to predict some of the criterion variables.Though it cannot replace existing explicit measurements, it reflects the negative mood of athletes to some extent.