Paternity leave duration and maternal depressive symptoms: a longitudinal study of paternal involvement and coparenting in Japan.

From a traditional perspective, athletic performance in high-performance contexts has been understood as the result of the interaction between biophysical, technical, and tactical factors. However, more recent research has broadened this view by introducing psychological resources as a fourth central element in the explanation of athletic performance. This shift is particularly relevant in elite sport, where the margin between success and failure is often narrow and where small variations in recovery, emotional states, self-confidence, or optimal functioning may distinguish average from superior performances. Thus, athletic performance should be understood as the result of a complex interaction between physiological capacity, technical-tactical skills, psychological readiness, and emotional and recovery-related self-regulation processes (; ; ; ; ; ; ; ). Understanding athletic performance requires a multidimensional perspective that considers not only risk factors, such as anxiety, fatigue, or insufficient recovery, but also adaptive resources, including purpose, self-confidence, and flow experience. This perspective can be framed through an adaptation of the Job Demands–Resources model () to sport, assuming that performance results from the balance between competitive demands and athletes’ available resources (). In elite sport, demands include physical intensity, time pressure, tactical uncertainty, evaluative exposure, rapid decision-making, and emotional load. Highly demanding contexts also involve strong attentional requirements, perceived control, and environmental uncertainty, making psychological self-regulation central to performance (). In team sports, competition imposes a high mental load through continuous concentration, contextual monitoring, interpretation of teammates’ and opponents’ movements, and rapid decisions (). Competition is also emotionally activating, making emotional regulation crucial under pressure (; ). When demands exceed resources, athletes may experience anxiety, fatigue, and performance deterioration; conversely, robust resources may help athletes appraise demands as motivating challenges and may be associated with stronger self-regulation and persistence (; ). Within this framework, sport calling is used in the present study as a psychological construct rather than as a colloquial synonym for passion, preference, or vocation. Drawing on contemporary calling theory and its extension to the sport domain, sport calling can be conceptualized as an internally driven psychological orientation reflecting a strong alignment between identity, purpose, and engagement in sport. Calling has been described as a multidimensional orientation grounded in meaningful and persistent passion, identity centrality, purpose, commitment, engagement, and willingness to sacrifice (; ; ; ). Applied to sport, calling may therefore be understood as a deeply embedded person–activity relationship through which athletes experience sport as a central source of identity, meaning, purpose, personal fulfilment, and sustained commitment. Although still underexplored in sport, this context is especially relevant for the emergence of calling. argued that calling may help explain meaningful lives and careers in sport. Elite athletes often invest intensively in their discipline from an early age, organize their lives around training and competition, and strongly identify with the athletic role. Consequently, sport may become a central domain through which athletes construct meaning and personal value.