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Feelin' Good...And Then Some: A Functional Evolutionary Approach to Positive Emotions in Sport

Description
Sport is a widespread phenomenon across human cultures and history. Unfortunately, positive emotions in sport have been long vaguely characterized as happy or pleasant, or ignored altogether. Recent emotion research has taken a differentiated approach, however, suggesting there are distinct positive emotions with diverse implications for behavior. The present study…

Sport is a widespread phenomenon across human cultures and history. Unfortunately, positive emotions in sport have been long vaguely characterized as happy or pleasant, or ignored altogether. Recent emotion research has taken a differentiated approach, however, suggesting there are distinct positive emotions with diverse implications for behavior. The present study applied this evolutionarily informed approach in the context of sport to examine which positive emotions are associated with play. It was hypothesized that pride, amusement, and enthusiasm, but not contentment or awe, would increase in Ultimate Frisbee players during a practice scrimmage. Further, it was hypothesized that increases in pride and amusement during practice would be differentially associated with sport outcomes, including performance (scores, assists, and defenses), subjective social connectedness, attributions of success, and attitudes toward the importance of practice. It was found that all positive emotions decreased during practice. It was also found that increases in pride were associated with more scores and greater social connectedness, whereas increases in amusement were associated with more assists. The present study was one of the first to examine change in positive emotions during play and to relate them to specific performance outcomes. Future studies should expand to determine which came first: emotion or performance.
ContributorsKuna, Jacob Anthony (Author) / Shiota, Michelle (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Danvers, Alexander (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
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Personal Memories and Social Associations: How Positive Emotions Influence the Activation of Implicit Prejudices

Description
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of two positive discrete emotions, awe and nurturant love, on implicit prejudices. After completing an emotion induction task, participants completed Implicit Association Test blocks where they paired photos of Arab and White individuals with "good" and "bad" evaluations. We hypothesized…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of two positive discrete emotions, awe and nurturant love, on implicit prejudices. After completing an emotion induction task, participants completed Implicit Association Test blocks where they paired photos of Arab and White individuals with "good" and "bad" evaluations. We hypothesized that nurturant love would increase the strength of negative evaluations of Arab individuals and positive evaluations of White individuals, whereas awe would decrease the strength of these negative evaluations when compared to a neutral condition. However, we found that both awe and nurturant love increased negative implicit prejudices toward Arab individuals when compared to the neutral condition.
ContributorsCarrasco, Mia Annette (Author) / Shiota, Michelle (Thesis director) / O'Neil, Makenzie (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Relative phase dynamics in motor-respiratory coordination

Description
Motor-respiratory coordination is the synchronization of movement and breathing during exercise. The relation between movement and breathing can be described using relative phase, a measure of the location in the movement cycle relative to the location in the breathing cycle. Stability in that relative phase relation has been identified as…

Motor-respiratory coordination is the synchronization of movement and breathing during exercise. The relation between movement and breathing can be described using relative phase, a measure of the location in the movement cycle relative to the location in the breathing cycle. Stability in that relative phase relation has been identified as important for aerobic efficiency. However, performance can be overly attracted to stable relative phases, preventing the performance or learning of more complex patterns. Little research exists on relative phase dynamics in motor-respiratory coordination, although those observations underscore the importance of learning more. In contrast, there is an extensive literature on relative phase dynamics in interlimb coordination. The accuracy and stability of different relative phases, transitions between patterns, and asymmetries between components are well understood. Theoretically, motor-respiratory and interlimb coordination may share dynamical properties that operate in their different physiological substrates. An existing model of relative phase dynamics in interlimb coordination, the Haken, Kelso, Bunz model, was used to gain an understanding of relative phase dynamics in the less-researched motor-respiratory coordination. Experiments 1 and 2 were designed to examine the interaction of frequency asymmetries between movement and breathing with relative phase and frequency, respectively. In Experiment 3, relative phase stability and transitions in motor-respiratory coordination were explored. Perceptual constraints on differences in stability were investigated in Experiment 4. Across experiments, contributions relevant to questions of coordinative variability were made using a dynamical method called cross recurrence quantification analysis. Results showed much consistency with predictions from an asymmetric extension of the Haken, Kelso, Bunz model and theoretical interpretation in the interlimb coordination literature, including phase wandering, intermittency, and an interdependence of perception and action. There were, however, notable exceptions that indicated stability can decrease with more natural frequency asymmetries and the connection of cross recurrence measures to categories of variability needs further clarification. The complex relative phase dynamics displayed in this study suggest that movement and breathing are softly-assembled by functional constraints and indicate that motor-respiratory coordination is a self-organized system.
ContributorsHessler, Eric Edward (Author) / Amazeen, Polemnia G (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric L (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Committee member) / Gray, Rob (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Dynamical Analysis of Heart Rate Variability and Personality

Description

A dynamical approach is used to avoid isolating systems and instead view systems as interacting together. The current study applied a dynamical approach to heart rate variability and personality. There were two main research questions that this study sought to answer with a dynamical analysis of heart rate variability and…

A dynamical approach is used to avoid isolating systems and instead view systems as interacting together. The current study applied a dynamical approach to heart rate variability and personality. There were two main research questions that this study sought to answer with a dynamical analysis of heart rate variability and personality: “Can we listen to a heartbeat and draw connections to behavior and personality?” and “Is dynamical analysis more effective than traditional analysis at finding correlations between heart rate variability and personality?” To answer these questions a dynamical analysis of heart rate variability was conducted (detrended fluctuation analysis; DFA) along with traditional analysis (standard deviations of NN intervals, SDNN, and root mean squared of successive deviations, RMSSD) and then correlations between heart rate variability measures and personality traits from the Big Five Inventory, Positive and Negative Affect schedule, and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory were examined. Data for this study came from the Rapid Automatic & Adaptive Model for Performance Prediction (RAAMP2) Dataset that was part of The Multimodal Objective Sensing to Assess Individuals with Context (MOSAIC) project. There were no statistically significant correlations between heart rate variability and personality. However, there were notable correlations between extraversion and SDNN and RMSSD and between positive affect and SDNN and RMSSD. We found that SDNN and RMSSD were more closely correlated to each other compared to DFA to either measure. This suggests that DFA can provide information that SDNN and RMSSD do not. Future research can explore dynamic analysis of heart rate variability and other nested systems.
ContributorsBrown, Brent (Author) / Amazeen, Polemnia (Thesis director) / Corbin, William (Committee member) / Amazeen, Eric (Committee member) / Danvers, Alexander (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2021-12