Dr. Mosewich’s research interests focus on the examination of stress, coping, emotion, and resultant cognitive and behavioural responses within the sport domain. The sport context can present many challenges, and ensuring athletes have the skills and resources to effectively manage different issues in sport is essential to promote adaptive responses to stress and emotion and foster successful sport experiences that are also positive and healthy.
A key directive of her work is to understand the psychological skills and resources necessary to facilitate successful and positive sport experiences and how best to foster their development.
The current focus of Dr. Mosewich’s research surrounds self-compassion as a potential coping resource for athletes. The premise is that promoting self-compassionate frames of mind might promote acceptance, acknowledgement, and accurate evaluation of sport situations, and attenuate ruminative or avoidant approaches, better allowing an athlete to move forward in pursuit of his or her goals and highest possible level of performance.
To further understand the role of self-compassion in the sport context, Dr. Mosewich and her colleagues have been conducting research employing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies involving age group, varsity level, and international caliber athletes from Canada and Australia. Current research is aimed at exploring the role of self-compassion in the stress and coping process, as well as the process and experience of self-compassion development. The effectiveness and efficacy of self-compassion intervention on factors such as coping skills, rumination, self-criticism, emotion, attention, and motivation is also being examined.