Perspectives on mood and emotion in sport

Australian 1996 Paralympics wheelchair basketball gold medallist Nick Morris shows his emotion. Image credit: John Sherwell.

Sport acts as a catalyst for powerful emotional responses in both participants and spectators.  The nature of emotions, their cause, and how they relate to motivation, cognition, and behaviour is an area of much research and debate in psychology.

For the purposes of this course, emotion can be defined as a response to the meaning that we attach to our interactions with the world around us.

A mood can be described as a set of constantly changing feelings that vary in terms of strength and duration. Moods are longer in duration than emotions and more general in nature and give clues to an individual’s psychological well-being. Collectively, moods and emotions are referred to as affective responses, or more simply as feelings.

The mood of athletes can indicate the likelihood of success in training and competition, and plays a critical role in mobilising personal resources that enable them to cope with the demands of their chosen sport.

• ANDY LANE, SPORT PSYCHOLOGIST Athletes experience intense feelings before, during, and after competition. We label these feelings emotions and moods and although there are differences between the two, both have powerful effects on behaviour.
  
  Identifying the feelings associated with best and worst performances is a good starting point to help athletes prepare for competition. Feeling vigorous and excited tends to aid performance, whereas feeling sad, confused, and fatigued often leads to performing worse. 
  
  Anger and anxiety help some people perform better by raising effort but lead to poor performance in others. By helping athletes understand how feelings influence performance, we can begin to tailor interventions to help them regulate and control their moods and emotions.

Mood and emotion indicators

Some interesting properties of moods and emotions:

• Many emotions have distinct signals that are easily recognised, such as the facial expressions associated with anger or hostility (frowning, intense focus, flared nostrils, etc.).
• We tend to infer people’s moods from emotional signals, but they are not always accurate.
• We tend to intuitively monitor our own moods and emotions.
• There is a two-way relationship between moods and emotions. Our mood can shape our emotional reaction to a situations, and conversely the emotional experience can influence our future mood.

Circumplex model of affective responses

The circumplex model of affect (Russell, 1980) [doi:10.1037/h0077714]The circumplex model reflects two broad dimensions of affective responses; activation-deactivation and unpleasant-pleasant.

• On the vertical axis, activation refers to a state of readiness and high arousal whereas deactivation reflects sluggishness and low arousal.
• On the horizontal axis, unpleasant refers to negative feelings which are undesirable whereas pleasant is associated with positive feelings for which we all tend to strive.

Within each quadrant are examples of feelings where the two dimensions intersect. For example, feelings of happiness and excitement reflect the activation and pleasant dimensions.

An alternative approach

As an alternative to the circumplex model, psychologists use a range of discrete emotions to describe the mood of a person. These include negative feelings such as tension, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion, and positive feelings such as vigour and happiness.

This latter approach lends itself well to assessments of mood over time (also known as mood profiling), and enables sport psychologists, coaches and athletes to gauge the effects of affective responses on sport performance. In the next section we will explore mood profiling further.