Investigating the relationships of spiritual happiness, academic achievement, creativity, and social attitudes with young professional athletes’ success (developing a model of mental health and sports achievements)

The psychological dimensions of success in young professional athletes need to be further investigated so that appropriate support can be provided in line with mental health and improving living and academic conditions.

The present study investigated the relationships among spiritual Happiness, academic achievement, creativity, and social attitudes with young professional athletes’ success by developing a model of mental health and sports achievements.

Descriptive-correlational study and a cross-sectional survey. For this purpose, 165 (89 male and 76 female) professional athletes aged between 15 and 18 were selected from the members of national teams and athletes. The research instruments included demographic sheets, informed consent forms, a General Health Questionnaire, Raudsepp's (1999) Creativity Scale, the social attitudes of Afrouz and Jordan (1976), the Spiritual Happiness Scale (SVS) of Chaprian and Afrouz (2016), Academic Achievement, and Sports Success Scale (SSS).

The results of the path analysis and Sobel test run in the LISREL software revealed that spiritual happiness, creativity, mental health, and academic achievement were significantly related to the sporting success of young professional athletes, while there was no significant relationship between social attitudes and sports success. Likewise, Spiritual Happiness, creativity, and social attitudes were associated with the mental health of young professional athletes. However, there was no significant association between academic achievement and mental health. Furthermore, mental health significantly mediated the relationships of Spiritual and creativity with the sports success of young professional athletes. However, no similar contribution was observed concerning the components of academic achievement and social attitudes.

The results showed that the proposed structural model was desirably fit for sports success with mental health mediation.