INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECTS OF HANDBALL ATHLETES’ POSITIVE PERCEPTION LEVELS TO THE MENTAL TOUGHNESS LEVELS

Mental toughness and Positive perception at sports positively increases the individual's self-esteem, self-confidence and perspective towards time (Icerson & Pines, 2013; tra., Ak？n et al., 2014). The current study examined the effect of the positive perception of the athletes participating in the Uni-League Handball Competitions to the mental toughness. One hundred twelve athletes (78 females & 34 males; Average age = 22.45±1.84) created from university teams. In order to measure athletes’ positive perception levels and mental toughness levels, " Mental Toughness Scale" developed by Sheard et al. (2009) and "Positive Perception Scale" developed by Ak？n et al. (2015) were used. Skewness-Kurtosis normality distribution test was used to determine whether the measurements were appropriate for normal distribution. So, All dimensions showed the normal distribution. In the direction of Levene test, Multiple Regression analysis was used. The results indicated that the mental toughness (Mean=42,70) levels of the ethletes are nearly mid-level and the positive perception levels of them are high (Mean = 47.60). According to the results of regression analysis, there is a low level relationship between dependent variable and independent variables. Changes in the dependent variable of the independent variables explains 12, 4%. In addition, Effect of the Positive Perception levels of Past Tense, the Human Nature and Selfness to the mental toughness was found to be statistically significan