Mustafa SarkarNottingham Trent University | NTU · Department of Sport Science
Mustafa Sarkar
BSc, PGDip, MSc, PhD
About
48
Publications
175,909
Reads
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4,421
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2015 - August 2020
Position
- Professor (Associate)
Description
- I am an Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. My teaching, research, and consultancy focuses on the psychology of sporting excellence and its application to other high performance domains (e.g., business).
October 2013 - August 2015
Position
- Research Associate
Description
- I worked within the School of Sport & Exercise, across the Faculty of Applied Sciences (psychological sciences subject group), and with external partners to develop the Faculty’s research profile in related areas.
October 2010 - October 2014
Position
- PhD Research Student in Sport and Performance Psychology
Description
- In December 2014, I successfully defended my PhD, which investigated the assessment of psychological resilience in sport performers.
Publications
Publications (48)
Over a decade of research attests to the importance of resilience in the workplace for employee well-being and performance. Yet, surprisingly, there has been no attempt to synthesize the evidence for the efficacy of resilience training in this context. The purpose of this study, therefore is to provide a systematic review of work-based resilience t...
In this paper we review recent developments in team resilience research in elite sport. Although resilience has become a popular and well-researched topic from an individual (psychological) perspective, less attention has been paid to whether this construct is conceptually and operationally robust at a group level. In this review, we provide an ove...
Although there is burgeoning research on resilience in elite athletes, there has been no empirical investigation of resilience in elite coaches. The purpose of this study was to explore psychological resilience in world-class coaches and how they develop resilience in athletes. A longitudinal qualitative design was adopted due to the dynamic and te...
Drawing on the growing body of resilience research in elite sport, and the evaluation of the applied impact of this research with various national and international athletes and teams, the purpose of this article is to discuss the development of individual and team resilience with practical recommendations provided for athletes, coaches, and sport...
Despite a growing evidence base on the effectiveness of community-based physical activity interventions for mental health, there is a lack of studies that focus on those affected by severe mental illness (SMI), who often experience poorer physical health, and are less physically active than the wider population. The use of peer support groups in th...
Objective: Havening is a psychosensory therapeutic technique that purportedly harnesses
the power of touch to stimulate oxytocin release and facilitate adaptive processing of
distressing thoughts/memories. Although Havening is used in clinics worldwide, with
anecdotal evidence, very few empirical studies exist to support its efficacy or mechanism
o...
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in children and adolescents, is typically managed with medications which are associated with negative side effects. Therefore, non-pharmacological treatments, such as physical activity, are an attractive option. The aim of this meta-analysis was to...
Previous research has assessed the affects release from football academies has on psychological distress and athletic identity of players. However, there has been no qualitative research exploring players' experiences of the release process. This study retrospectively explored players' lived experiences of being released from a professional footbal...
Objectives
Although organizational resilience research has identified the characteristics of elite sport organizations that successfully deal with significant change, further research is needed to understand how they function. The objective of this study was to explore the psychosocial processes underpinning organizational resilience in elite sport...
Introduction
The extent to which coaches and athletes can effectively work together is an essential consideration in the pursuit of athletic success. This is particularly important at the elite level due to the high pressures on tangible outcomes, such as reaching the podium of a major competition. This study sought to explore and explain how both...
Psychological resilience is the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure, consisting of the interaction between the individual and the environment over time. It is essential when operating in extreme environments which are typically characterised by a complex combination of stressors with increased elements of risk and adversity. Psy...
The Daily Mile™ is a widely implemented school-based physical activity initiative. However, only two studies have explored the acute effects of participation in The Daily Mile on children’s cognitive functioning, reporting conflicting findings. Moreover, enjoyment of exercise is a determining factor in children’s motivation for, and adherence to, i...
Personnel in many professions must remain “ready” to perform diverse activities. Managing individual and collective capability is a common concern for leadership and decision makers. Typical existing approaches for monitoring readiness involve keeping detailed records of training, health and equipment maintenance, or – less commonly – data from wea...
Objectives
Organizational resilience has been investigated in numerous performance contexts outside of sport, with substantial conceptual and operational variance. Given the growing interest in organizational environments in sport, the purpose of the study was to construct a definition of organizational resilience and identify resilient characteris...
Objectives
The purpose of this study was to gain student-athlete perceptions of: (1) the definition of leadership for high school student-athletes; (2) the process of leadership development in high school sport; and (3) the factors that have helped or hindered leadership transfer between high school sport and other life domains.
Design
This study...
Since the mid-1990s the constructs of growth, resilience, and thriving have often been conflated and the labels used interchangeably to describe similar experiences. As research literature has grown, separate bodies of work have emerged on each of the constructs giving rise to questions of a jangle fallacy. The purpose of this chapter is to synthes...
Abstract
Background: Service centres for homeless adults are potential settings for implementation of reintegration interventions. This study aimed to evaluate 1) the acceptability of a group-based programme among individuals from the broad population of homeless people, and 2) if a future study of its feasibility and acceptability for re-housed h...
The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of performance slumps in cricket from the perspective of psychological resilience. Findings from a thematic analysis of a focus group (n = 4 athletes) and one-to-one interviews (n = 10 athletes) with 14 expert cricket batsmen indicated that numerous factors associated with psychological resili...
Resilience refers to findings that some individuals have good outcomes despite exposure to stressors, and protective factors are defined as influences that alter a person’s response to such stressors. Academic resilience research identifies factors that promote positive educational outcomes; however, no research to date investigates student resilie...
Education programmes in mental health literacy can address stigma and misunderstanding of mental health. This study investigated self-rated differences in knowledge, attitudes and confidence around mental health issues following participation in a bespoke Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training course for the Armed Forces. The mixed methods approac...
Adversity is viewed as both an inevitable and important experience for elite athletes (Howells et al., 2017). The purpose of this study was to explore elite athletes’ perceptions of the experiences and characteristics that helped them to overcome a shared sport-specific adversity. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 professional athle...
Daily stressors, or hassles, refer to the everyday environmental demands that constitute a threat or challenge, or exceed an individual’s biological or psychological capacities. Increasing evidence suggests that daily stressors have a significant impact on adolescents’ educational outcomes, for example, performance, wellbeing and negative attitudes...
Informed by and drawing on both the integrated model of response to sport injury (Wiese-Bjornstal, Smith, Shaffer, & Morrey, 1998) and the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat states (Blascovich, 2008), this multi-study paper examined whether preinjury adversity affected postinjury responses over a five-year time period. Study 1 employed a...
There is evidence that the social groups to which people belong can be a source of resilience in challenging times. In this paper, we examine whether social group memberships can also increase resilience in the face of negative performance feedback by encouraging task persistence. In two experiments (Ns = 63, 61) participants completed three rounds...
Research suggests that experiencing a moderate number of adverse life events can benefit future stress responses. This study explored the relationship between adverse life (i.e., non-sport) events and cardiovascular responses to, and performance during, a pressurized sporting task. One hundred participants (64 men, 36 women; Mage = 21.94 years, SDa...
Research points to the notion that athletes have the potential to benefit from difficulty. This phenomenon—otherwise known as growth following adversity—has attracted increasing attention from sport psychology scholars. In this paper, we systematically review and synthesize the findings of studies in this area to better understand: (a) how growth h...
Drawing on Hardy et al.’s study as the target article, in this commentary, we focus on the adversity-related experiences and consequences of the Olympic and/or World champions that they sampled. With this in mind, we divide the narrative into two main sections. In the first section, we explore the association between adversity-related experiences a...
This multi-study paper reports the development and initial validation of an inventory for the Characteristics of Resilience in Sports Teams (CREST). In four related studies, 1225 athletes from Belgium and the United Kingdom were sampled. The first study provided content validity for an initial item set. The second study explored the factor structur...
Drawing on the body of knowledge in this area, this article presents an evidence-based approach to developing psychological resilience for sustained success. To this end, the narrative is divided into three main sections. The first section describes the construct of psychological resilience and explains what it is. The second section outlines and d...
Objectives: Recent research suggests that experiencing some adversity can have beneficial outcomes for human growth and development. The purpose of this paper was to explore the adversities that the world's best athletes encounter and the perceived role that these experiences play in their psychological and performance development.
Design: A qualit...
As part of an increased effort to understand the most effective ways to psychologically prepare athletes and teams for Olympic competition, a number of sport psychology consultants have offered best-practice insights into working in this context. These individual reports have typically comprised anecdotal reflections of working with particular spor...
Psychological resilience is important in sport because athletes must utilise and optimise a range of mental qualities to withstand the pressures that they experience. In this article, we discuss psychological resilience in sport performers via a review of the stressors athletes encounter and the protective factors that help them withstand these dem...
Although resilience has been referred to as "ordinary magic" (Masten, 2001, p. 227) that is more common than once thought, the majority of research in this area has sampled individuals who have been required to react to potentially traumatic events outside of their control. The findings of this work, however, are not easily applicable to those who...
Psychological resilience is important in sport because athletes must constantly withstand a wide range of pressures to attain and sustain high performance. To advance psychologists’ understanding of this area, there exists an urgent need to develop a sport-specific measure of resilience. The purpose of this article is to review psychometric issues...
Objectives: The objectives of this study were to develop a definition of team resilience and to identify the resilient characteristics of elite sport teams.
Design and method: Focus groups consisting of a total of 31 participants were conducted with five elite teams from a range of sports. An interpretive thematic analysis using inductive and deduc...
The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the variety of definitions, concepts, and theories of psychological resilience. To this end, the narrative is divided into three main sections. The first considers how resilience has been defined in the psychology research literature. Despite the construct being operationalized in a variety of way...
Projects
Projects (3)
To examine the characteristics and processes of resilient elite sport organisations, and how organisational resilience may be developed in a sport context.
It was the general objective of this project to
(1) develop a measurement instrument, quantifying resilience characteristics at the team level
(2) explore the relation between team-level resilience characteristics and coaches’ and athletes’ leadership
(3) identify the use of mental skills and performance outcomes in more resilient teams
(4) examine antecedents and consequences of team resilience in a longitudinal perspective
