How individuals respond to adversity is one component of mental toughness and athletes may manage the adversity of a defeat in very different ways. In this article we focus on four types of cognition (appraisal, attribution, counterfactual thinking, and rumination) that athletes may exhibit in the immediate aftermath of a competitive defeat. In particular we define each of these terms and present a “caricature ”of each of the respective literatures, focussing on the prevailing trends and substantive findings. These caricatures assist in the identification of several areas in which literature on athletes’ retrospective cognition about defeat may be advanced. We use combat sports as a vehicle to illustrate our propositions.

• Please provide 3-5 bullet points of the paper.

• Little is known about how athletes psychologically manage adversity, a key component of mental toughness.

• There is a great deal of conceptual overlap between four types of retrospective cognition (appraisal, attribution, rumination and counterfactual thinking) athletes may exhibit after defeat.

• Rather than continue of examine these retrospective cognitions in isolation, there appears to be value in consideration of these constructs collectively to enhance theoretical parsimony.