Giving yourself a good beating: appraisal, attribution, rumination, and counterfactual thinking.

How individuals respond to adversity is one component of mental toughness and athletes may manage the adversity of a defeat in very different ways. In this article we focus on four types of cognition (appraisal, attribution, counterfactual thinking, and rumination) that athletes may exhibit in the immediate aftermath of a competitive defeat. In particular we define each of these terms and present a "caricature "of each of the respective literatures, focussing on the prevailing trends and substantive findings.