Psychophysiological responses to sport-specific affective pictures: A study of morality and emotion in athletes
Highlights
► This study provides novel support for the emotion–morality relationship in sport. ► Moral disengagement and empathy were linked with emotions to unpleasant pictures. ► Moral variables appear to be more closely linked with valence measures of emotion. ► Viewing sport pictures can be a useful method to assess emotion in athletes.
Section snippets
Emotion in the picture viewing paradigm
One way researchers have assessed emotion is by examining psychophysiological responses to unpleasant, neutral and pleasant pictures (Lang & Bradley, 2010). This methodology is based on the biphasic theory (Lang, 1985), which defines emotion as action dispositions organized around the two dimensions of valence and arousal. In this view, there are two motivational systems in the brain – appetitive and aversive – which reflect the valence dimension. Arousal is the degree to which the dominant
Morality and emotion
In his social cognitive theory of moral thought and action, Bandura (1991) proposed that emotion plays a self-regulatory role in moral behaviour: Individuals typically refrain from behaving in ways that violate their moral standards to avoid experiencing negative emotion, such as guilt. However, antisocial behaviour still occurs. This happens because individuals are able to minimize or avoid the negative emotions associated with antisocial behaviour. They do this via moral disengagement, which
The present study
Although the picture-viewing paradigm has been used extensively in non-sport contexts (see Lang & Davis, 2006), research in the sport domain is limited. To date, only two studies have used this paradigm in athletes (Collins, Hale, & Loomis, 1995; Stanger et al., 2012). In the first study, Collins et al. (1995) asked athletes and non-athletes to view 27 pictures depicting pleasant (e.g., opposite sex nudes, food, children), neutral (e.g., neutral faces, household objects) and unpleasant (e.g.,
Participants
Participants were male (n = 40) and female (n = 26) student athletes who played competitive football (n = 30), field hockey (n = 24), or rugby (n = 12). These sports were selected because they are medium-to-high contact sports, where moral issues are salient (Bredemeier, Weiss, Shields, & Cooper, 1986) and antisocial behaviour occurs (Kavussanu & Boardley, 2009). Participants were aged between 18 and 25 (M = 19.95, SD = 1.61) years and had competed in their respective sport for an average of
Results
Prior to the main analyses, preliminary analysis exploring the data revealed two outliers for valence ratings and one for startle blink response (i.e., values greater than 3 SDs from the mean). Due to the potential impact that outliers can have on the results (particularly for correlational analysis) (Osborne & Overbay, 2004), these outliers were removed from subsequent analysis. Then, normality of the data was checked by examining univariate skewness and kurtosis scores, which were less than
Discussion
The relationship between morality and emotion has received very little attention in sport psychology research (e.g., Stanger et al., 2012). To fill this gap in the literature we examined the link between moral variables and emotional reactions using the picture viewing paradigm with sport-specific pictures. Prior to discussing the main study findings, we discuss the psychophysiological responses to the sport pictures.
Conclusion
The use of affective sport pictures provides a suitable method for assessing emotion in athletes. The present findings provide some support for the expected links of moral disengagement and empathy to emotion. This study also confirmed that psychopathy was associated with blunted startle blinks in a sporting sample. However, there were no links found with antisocial sport behaviour. It appears that moral variables may be associated with specific emotional responses highlighting the utility of
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2023, Psychology of Sport and ExerciseCitation Excerpt :Cause and effect can be difficult to establish, and the true mechanism of the relationship even more obscure. For instance, higher psychopathy scores have been associated with reduced reactivity to unpleasant/immoral sports-related pictures (Stanger, Kavussanu, Willoughby, & Ring, 2012), but this finding does not infer that those with higher psychopathy scores would perpetrate similar actions themselves. Machiavellianism predicted trait aggression in athletes, mirroring findings in ice hockey players (Russell, 1974) which also supported the beneficial nature of higher Machiavellianism and aggression for performance.
Heart rate and skin conductance associations with physical aggression, psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder: An updated meta-analysis
2022, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsAffective startle modulation and psychopathology: Implications for appetitive and defensive brain systems
2019, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsMoral behavior in sport
2017, Current Opinion in PsychologyCitation Excerpt :In addition to the potential consequences moral behavior can have on other athletes’ welfare, some evidence indicates that teammate behaviors could have important achievement-related consequences in sport. Although longitudinal (e.g., [13••]) and experimental (e.g., [14,15••,17••,24]) designs have been used in some studies, more research is needed employing such designs to provide stronger evidence for the direction of causality in the identified relationships. This work could be used to inform the development and testing of interventions aimed at promoting prosocial and reducing antisocial behavior in sport.
Pain thresholds, pain-induced frontal alpha activity and pain-related evoked potentials are associated with antisocial behavior and aggressiveness in athletes
2016, Psychology of Sport and ExerciseCitation Excerpt :They also reported moderate levels of moral disengagement. These scores are in line with those reported in previous research (e.g., Boardley & Kavussanu, 2008; Kavussanu & Boardley, 2009; Stanger, Kavussanu, Boardley, & Ring, 2013; Stanger, Kavussanu, & Ring, 2012; Stanger, Kavussanu, Willoughby, et al., 2012). Pearson correlations showed that moral disengagement was positively related to antisocial behavior, r(92) = .48, p < .001, and aggressiveness, r(92) = .67, p < .001.
Empathy in sports, exercise, and the performing arts
2014, Psychology of Sport and ExerciseCitation Excerpt :Indeed, the finding that males engage more frequently than females in antisocial behaviors was partially accounted for by empathy (i.e., lower empathy leading to more antisocial behavior) (Kavussanu et al., 2009). When participants were randomly allocated to higher or lower empathy experimental groups (which were instructed to take a person's perspective and imagine how the person is feeling vs. taking an objective perspective), individuals in the high-empathy group experienced stronger negative emotional reactions (e.g., related to unpleasantness and arousal) when viewing images of aggressive acts and reported lower likelihood to engage in aggressive acts than those in the low-empathy group (Stanger, Kavussanu, & Ring, 2012; see also Stanger, Kavussanu, Willoughby, & Ring, 2012). Finally, in the music domain, it was shown that listening to songs with prosocial lyrics led to more interpersonal empathy, and this, in turn, instigated helping behavior in experimental participants toward a person in need (Greitemeyer, 2009a).