Why Olympic Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Medalists

With the Beijing Winter Olympics upon us, Team USA has made clear that it is approaching this year’s Games with a special emphasis on the mental health of its athletes. This perhaps comes as no surprise after American gymnast Simon Biles set off an impassioned conversation about the emotional tribulations of elite athletes when she withdrew from several events of the Tokyo Olympics last year. She liberated others to share their own struggles with performing under intense pressure (not to mention televised scrutiny), and this new openness shows no signs of abating. At the end of January, top-ranked Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina announced that he would take a season off from the World Surf League to better tend to his own mental health. Role models like Biles and Medina are especially important right now as the COVID-19 pandemic has arguably left more people than ever facing mental-health crises of their own. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But few people know that, for scientists—or Team Science, as we like to call ourselves—athletes have long served as a microcosm of sorts for studying how all humans confront adversity. In a landmark 1995 study, psychologists Victoria Medvec, S.F. Madey, and Thomas Gilovich noted that bronze medalists, on the whole, visibly appeared significantly happier than the silver medalists who beat them out. We saw it at the Tokyo Summer Olympics when an ecstatic Great Britain women’s gymnastic team narrowly edg...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news