Mental toughness is a measure of individual psychological resilience and confidence that may predict success in sport, education, and in the workplace.
A person who has the qualities of mental toughness might accept challenges as they arise aiding them to achieve their goals whether that be in sports, academics, or in their professions.
[4] Scientific research has attempted a formal definition of mental toughness as a psychological construct with clear measurement criteria, which would allow robust analyses and comparisons to be made.
Graham Jones, Sheldon Hanton, and Declan Connaughton of the United States used personal construct psychology in interviews with elite athletes, as well as elite-level coaches and sport psychologists, to arrive at the following definition of mental toughness: Having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to: generally, cope better than your opponents with the many demands (competition, training, lifestyle) that sport places on a performer; specifically, be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, focused, confident, and in control under pressure.
[6] Peter Clough et al.[7] proposed a model of mental toughness that conceptualizes it as a personality trait.
[9] Daniel Gucciardi, Sandy Gordon, and James Dimmock of Australia have proposed a different definition and framework of mental toughness, based primarily on their work with Australian footballers.
Using personal construct psychology, these authors proposed the following definition of mental toughness: Mental toughness in Australian Football is a collection of values, attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that enable you to persevere and overcome any obstacle, adversity, or pressure experienced, but also to maintain concentration and motivation when things are going well to consistently achieve your goals.
They use samples of athletes to investigate a possible link between toughness, coping, emotional reactivity, psychological skills, and performance.
[23] In April 2020, researchers found that top gamers shared the ability to cope with stressors as well as Olympian athletes.
Two studies suggest that foundational processes during development enable individuals to build mental toughness throughout life.
[27] Horsburgh et al. demonstrated that genetic and non-shared environmental factors contribute to the development of mental toughness (as measured by questionnaire), and that mental toughness behaves "in the same manner as virtually every personality trait that has ever been investigated in behavioural genetic study".
[28]: 104 In establishing significant relationships with the big five personality factors of Costa and McCrae (1992),[full citation needed] these researchers have also provided evidence to support Clough et al.’s conceptualization of mental toughness.
Ruparel et al suggest that the relationship between mental toughness and more job demand leads to better authentic happiness.
Another trait of high mental toughness is it leads to achievement goal making, providing individuals with a state of mind to go above and beyond at work.
Additionally higher mental toughness can give a better desire for learning, boost confidence, and resilience.
[35] One of these studies was conducted by Smith et al. who looked at active-duty Airman's decreased suicidal rates in relation to those who had a support group and mental toughness.
[36] Over the span of three studies, Fitzwater et al. claim it to have proper psychometric properties, good reliability (tested through test-retest methods) concurrent validity and could be used as a decent predictor of performance.
On average, mentally tough people deal with academic anxiety more positively, by using coping mechanisms rather than avoidance techniques.
[41][42] Maintaining mental toughness and a feeling of control is correlated with higher academic performance in both men and women.
The term resilience is often incorrectly used interchangeably with mental toughness, though researchers have found the two constructs are positively associated with one another.
[43] However, psychologists define resilience as a positive adaptive process of coping with stress and adversity, as opposed to a collection of psychological attributes or personality traits.
This differs from the conceptions of mental toughness offered by both Jones et al. and Gucciardi et al. Those authors conceive of mental toughness as unstable, arising in development, fluctuating over time, and varying for an individual performer between different sport and life scenarios.
[28] Dr Lee Crust, University of Lincoln, compared the SMTQ with the MTQ48 and concluded "Both instruments appear to tap the core components of MT but the MTQ48 seemingly provides a more comprehensive measure".
For example, the Performance Profile Inventory (PPI) developed by Jim Loehr used seven subscales to compute a mental toughness score.