one's emotions in the course of protecting one's self-esteem. However, based on past evidence that positive mood motivates self-protective attributions for success and failure and increases the avoidance of negative feedback, recent research has focused on mood as an antecedent to self-handicapping; expecting positive mood to increase self-handicapping behaviour. Results have shown that people who are in positive mood are more likely to engage in self-handicapping, even at the cost of jeopardizing future performance. Research suggests that among those who self-handicap, self-imposed obstacles may relieve the pressure of a performance and allow one to become more engaged in a task. While this may enhance performance in some situations for some individuals, in general, research indicates that self-handicapping is negatively associated with performance, self-regulated learning, persistence and intrinsic motivation. Additional long-term costs of self-handicapping include worse health and well-being, more frequent negative moods and higher use of various substances. Zuckerman and Tsai assessed self-handicapping, well-being, and coping among college students on two occasions over several months. Self-handicapping assessed on the first occasion predicted coping with problems by denial, blaming others and criticizing oneself as well as depression and somatic complaints. Depression and somatic complaints also predicted subsequent self-handicapping. Thus, the use of self-handicapping may lead to not only uncertainty as to one's ability but also ill-being, which in turn may lead to further reliance on self-handicapping. Applications There are many real world applications for this concept. For example, if people predict they are going to perform poorly on tasks, they create obstacles, such as taking drugs and consuming alcohol, so that they feel that they have diverted the blame from themselves if they actually do fail. In addition, another way that people self-handicap is by creating already-made excuses just in case they fail. For example, if a student feels that he is going to perform badly on a test, then he might make up an excuse for his potential failure, such as telling his friends that he does not feel well the morning of the test. Occurrence in sports Previous research has suggested that because in Physical Education (PE) students are required to overtly display their physical abilities and incompetence could be readily observed by others, PE is an ideal setting to observe self-handicapping. Because of its prevalence in the sporting world, self-handicapping behaviour has become of interest to sports psychologists who are interested in increasing sports performance. A study published