Abstract:

The fact that the level of cognitive flexibility and coping with stress is high is a factor that reflects positively on performance in sports, therefore, in this study, it was aimed to correlate the age, sport age and style demographic characteristics of elite wrestlers with cognitive flexibility and stress coping strategy levels. The research was carried out with the relational survey model, one of the quantitative research methods, and a total of 157 male elite level wrestlers participated in the research, which was reached by the appropriate sampling method. The demographic information questionnaire created by the researchers, the "Stress Coping Scale" developed by Martin and Rubin (1995) and adapted into Turkish by Çelikkaleli (2014), and the "Cognitive Flexibility Scale" developed by Türküm (2002) were used to collect the data. In the data analysis, percentage, frequency, Cronbach Alpha coefficient calculations were made. The relationship between cognitive flexibility and coping with stress was examined/used with Pearson correlation analysis, and the effect of cognitive flexibility on coping with stress was calculated with simple regression analysis. While examining the personal characteristics of the participants, such as age, sports age and wrestling style, and whether there was a difference between the scales, the t-test for binary variables and the Anova test for more than two variables were used. As a result, it was found that there was no significant relationship between the age, sport age and wrestling style (freestyle and Greco-Roman) of elite level wrestlers, and their cognitive flexibility and coping with stress were moderate. In other words, it was seen that elite level wrestlers could not fully adapt to the problems they faced and their solution-generating processes were moderately successful.

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