The Psychology of Transcendence in Sport: Religious Coping, Spiritual Intelligence, and Cognitive Regulation Under Competitive Pressure

Abstract

Competitive pressure brings athletes into contact with uncertainty, intense bodily arousal, evaluative threat, and concerns about identity and purpose. This critical integrative narrative review examines whether experiences described as transcendence, situation-specific religious coping, and spiritual intelligence contribute to cognitive regulation in sport. The synthesis connects sport-focused religion and spirituality research with psychological accounts of meaning making, attention, emotion regulation, skilled performance, and athlete mental health. Three distinctions organize the analysis: spiritual meaning is not equivalent to religious affiliation; positive religious coping and spiritual struggle are not interchangeable; and self-reported spiritual intelligence is not an established general cognitive ability or a demonstrated cause of sporting success. A conditional framework proposes that personally endorsed meaning may alter appraisals, attentional choices, recovery from errors, and help seeking, while punitive interpretations, ritual dependence, or externally imposed expectations may heighten distress. Evidence from experimental choking research and mindfulness-based sport interventions provides plausible comparator mechanisms, but it does not establish a direct effect of transcendence on objective competition outcomes. The article advances preregisterable hypotheses, measurement requirements, matched comparisons, and ethical safeguards for longitudinal and intervention research. It reports no new participants, experimental results, or pooled estimates. Scientific usefulness depends on discriminating spiritual pathways from secular meaning, coaching support, expectancy effects, and established self-regulatory skills. transcendence in sport; religious coping; spiritual intelligence; competitive pressure; cognitive regulation; athlete well-being