Can we speak of a negative psychological tetrad in sports? A probabilistic Bayesian study on competitive sailing

INTRODUCTION: Researchers display an interest in studying aspects like the mental health of high-performance athletes; the dark side of sport, or the earliest attempts to study the so-called dark triad of personality in both initiation and high-performance athletes. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to determine the possible existence and magnitude of negative psychological aspects within a population of competition sailors and from a probabilistic point of view, using Bayesian Network analysis. METHODS: The study was carried out on 235 semi-professional sailors of the 49er Class, aged between 16 and 52 years (M = 24.66; SD = 8.03). RESULTS: The results show the existence of a Negative Tetrad—formed by achievement burnout, anxiety due to concentration disruption, amotivation and importance given to error—as a probabilistic product of the psychological variables studied: motivation, anxiety, burnout and fear of error. CONCLUSION: These results, supported by Bayesian networks, show holistically the influence of the social context on the psychological and emotional well-being of the athlete during competition at sea.