How Linguistic Framing Affects People's View of Athletes' Mental Health

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that the language we use has the powerful ability to shape our perceptions of the world around us. The way someone is depicted and perceived can affect that person's willingness to open up about their mental health struggles, especially in the world of sports (Parrott et al., 2019). The present study addresses language use, specifically metaphors, used to describe someone who is withdrawing form a competition due to mental health struggles. The primary goal of this experiment was to investigate if the language used to describe an athlete’s mental health issue versus a non-athletes’ mental health issue can influence how people react to someone prioritizing their mental health. This study was formatted as a between-subjects design where participants were presented with one news story about an athlete or non-athlete. The protagonist was either described as “mentally weak” or “mentally strong” for prioritizing their mental health and withdrawing from an important competition. Participants rated their support for the protagonist. Scores were combined into a “total support” category. We observed no main effect of language or athlete status on support for the protagonist. However, exploratory analyses revealed that participants who identified as athletes expressed less support for the protagonist when she was labelled mentally “weak” than “strong,” while non-athlete participants showed the opposite result. In addition, there were other significant findings relating to participants political affiliation. Keywords: Linguistic framing, mental health, athletes