Comparison of perfectionism, mental toughness, and aggression of combat athletes and military commandos

The present study was conducted to compare perfectionism, mental toughness, and aggression of combat athletes and military commandos.

The statistical sample includes 74 male athletes from Tehran clubs (regions 5, 9, 22) with more than seven years of sports experience in ten combat sports (karate, taekwondo, wushu, kickboxing, boxing, judo, wrestling, Kyokushin, hapkido, Kung Fu). Also, 78 special commandos of the 65th Brigade of the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran with more than seven years of experience were selected by random and subjective sampling method. Three standard questionnaires were used: Sports Mental toughness (Golby & Sheard, 2009), Multidimensional Sports Perfectionism-2 (Kalatos et al., 2010), and Competitive Anger and Aggression (Maxwell and Morris, 2007).

There was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of mean age and sports experience. The findings also showed that the variables of anger, aggression, total anger, personal criteria, importance by mistake, coach pressure, and overall perfectionism of the commando group were significantly higher than the combat athletes' group. However, there was no significant difference between sports mental toughness and its subscales between the two groups.

The present findings emphasize that the psychological variables of this study were not affected by combat sports. However, perhaps the environment, type and severity of training, or personality traits of the commandos caused a higher degree of aggression and perfectionism.