Psychophysiological responses to sport-specific affective pictures: A study of morality and emotion in athletes

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Abstract

Objectives

The link between morality and emotion has received little attention in the sport context. To address this issue, we examined whether moral disengagement, empathy, antisocial behaviour and psychopathy were associated with emotional reactions to unpleasant pictures depicting players being hurt or deliberately fouled in a sport context.

Design

A cross-sectional design was employed.

Method

Team sport athletes (N = 66) completed measures of moral disengagement, empathy, antisocial behaviour and psychopathy and then viewed unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant sport pictures while emotional reactions to the pictures were assessed using valence and arousal ratings of the pictures as well as electrocutaneous startle blink, heart rate, skin conductance, and evoked potentials.

Results

Moral disengagement, empathy and psychopathy, but not antisocial behaviour, were associated with emotional reactions to the unpleasant pictures. Specifically, moral disengagement was related to attenuated startle blink responses and higher valence (less unpleasant) ratings, whereas empathy was associated with lower valence (more unpleasant) ratings. Psychopathy was associated with smaller startle blink responses and less heart rate deceleration.

Conclusion

Our findings provide support for the link between morality and emotion in athletes. Moral variables may be more closely linked with specific measures of emotion, highlighting the utility of taking a multi-measure approach in the assessment of emotion.

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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