HALO Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Scott Rollo co-authored a new book chapter titled “The Myth of the Injury-prone Athlete: It’s Not Just about Personality After All”. This chapter covers the psychology of injury risk and discusses the influence of psychological factors, including personality, on risk behaviours and injury outcomes in sport-specific contexts. Citations details and an abstract of the chapter are below.
Congratulations, Scott!
Abstract
Anyone who participates in a sports pool knows that, when the time comes to draft your team, there are certain athletes you avoid picking because they always seem to be injured. Why is this the case? For a time, people suspected that certain personality characteristics made some athletes “injury-prone”; however, the evidence is conflicting. To figure out why that’s the case, this chapter discusses the nature of injury risk, drawing on models of causation to explore how personality might interact with other individual and situational variables to determine an athlete’s susceptibility. We also introduce the idea of complexity in injury prediction and explain the benefits and drawbacks of assessing personality factors in practice, with special attention to the ethical implications of risk profiling.
The full publication can be found here.
