PURPOSE: To identify the relationship between depression and anxiety indicators and Group Integration Task (GI-T) in college athletes.
METHODS: 224 college athletes from 11 team sports (134 men and 90 women with an age range between 19 and 24 years old) of a high-performance program were evaluated with a psychometrical battery that included the Goldberg’s anxiety and depression scale (two subscales with 9 questions each, that results in “With/Without anxiety” and “With/Without depression”) and; the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ) which evaluates the cohesion in team sports in four group and individual factors; Group Integration Task (GI-T) was the only one analyzed, the results were summarized in quartiles, the higher the quartile, the worst the score. Multinomial logistic regression was performed to analyze the association between Goldberg’s and GI-T scores.
RESULTS: Statistically significant associations were found between for presenting depression and the presence of third (p=0.01) and fourth (p=0.01) quartiles. On the other hand, showing anxiety was significantly associated with presenting scores on the fourth quartile only (p=0.03).
CONCLUSIONS: Those athletes that scored with probable depression or anxiety are associated with higher quartile punctuations in GI-T factor. Evaluating anxiety and depression in athletes of team sports could be a way to identify probable cohesiveness problems between their members. Similar studies are suggested to corroborate this result.

Table 1. Association between Depression and anxiety with GI-T scores.

	GI-T
	Q2	Q3	Q4
With depression	1.47 (0.68 - 3.15)	2.75* (1.34 - 5.68)	2.72* (1.27 - 5.83)
With anxiety	2.07 (0.82 - 5.23)	1.61 (6.53 - 3.96)	2.78* (1.14 - 6.80)
Data expressed in OR (95% CI). GI-T: Group integration task. Q: Quartile number.* p<0.05