It’s not unusual to see professional athletes lose their composure. Given the intensity of emotions athletes may experience during competition, it’s a wonder that more athletes don’t lose their cool or that it doesn’t happen more often.
During the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix, Red Bull’s driver, Max Verstappen, lost his cool. After a series of frustrating incidents on the track, Verstappen intentionally rammed another car (Gitlin, 2025).
After describing the following five emotion regulation strategies (McRae & Gross, 2020), invite students to work in small groups to identify which strategies Verstappen could have used in the moment that may have helped him not attack another driver.
- Situation selection—choosing situations for the emotion they may instill.
- Situation modification—changing the situation to alter an emotion.
- Attentional deployment—shifting attention toward or away from an emotion.
- Cognitive change—changing how we are thinking about the situation.
- Response modulation—changing what we do with the emotion by suppressing our outward expression of it or by altering our physiology, such as taking deep breaths.
As a bonus question, ask your students if they have experience with organized sports. For those who have, invite them to share what messages from coaches they’ve received, if any, about emotion regulation. Were those messages more about managing emotions in the heat of competition or more about managing emotions afterwards, such as after a disappointing loss?
Do your students have examples of when they or someone they knew lost their composure during a competition? On reflection, how might they have used the emotion regulation strategies to keep their composure?
References
Gitlin, J. M. (2025, June 2). F1 in Spain: Now that was a lapse in judgment. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/06/f1-in-spain-now-that-was-a-lapse-in-judgement
McRae, K., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000703
