As the Lights Fade: A Grounded Theory of Male Professional Athletes’ Decision-Making and Transition to Retirement

Retirement can be particularly challenging for professional athletes, given their commitment and identification with their sport. The purpose of this study was to examine how American male professional athletes make the decision to retire and how that decision process affects transition in retirement. The researchers used constructivist grounded theory to analyze personal accounts from professional athletes who wrote about retirement, and a model on the decision-making and transition process of retirement was developed. The findings show that athletes struggle in retirement, but by relying on their social support, they can accept the conclusion of their career as a professional athlete.     

Memory for goals: an activation‐based model

Goal‐directed cognition is often discussed in terms of specialized memory structures like the “goal stack.” The goal‐activation model presented here analyzes goal‐directed cognition in terms of the general memory constructs of activation and associative priming. The model embodies three predictive constraints: (1) the interference level, which arises from residual memory for old goals; (1) the strengthening constraint, which makes predictions about time to encode a new goal; and (3) the priming constraint, which makes predictions about the role of cues in retrieving pending goals. These constraints are formulated algebraically and tested through simulation of latency and error data from the Tower of Hanoi, a means‐ends puzzle that depends heavily on suspension and resumption of goals. Implications of the model for understanding intention superiority, postcompletion error, and effects of task interruption are discussed.