Work

Skiing and Thinking About It: Moment-to-Moment and Retrospective Analysis of Emotions in an Extreme Sport

Year: 2018

Type: article

Abstract: Happiness is typically reported as an important reason for participating in challenging activities like extreme sport. While in the middle of the activity, however, participants do not seem particularly happy. So where does the happiness come from? The article proposes some answers from a study of facially expressed emotions measured moment-by-moment during a backcountry skiing event. Self-reported emotions were also assessed immediately after the skiing. Participants expressed lower levels of happiness while skiing, compared to when stopping for a break. Moment-to-moment and self-reported measures of emotions were largely unrelated. These findings are explained with reference to the Functional Wellbeing Approach (Vittersø, 2013), which argues that some moment-to-moment feelings are non-evaluative in the sense of being generated directly by the difficulty of an activity. By contrast, retrospective emotional feelings are more complex as they include an evaluation of the overall goals and values associated with the activity as a whole.

Source: Frontiers in Psychology

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00971

Authors: Audun Hetland, Joar Vittersø, Simen Oscar Bø Wie, Eirik Kjelstrup, Matthias Mittner, Tove Irene Dahl

Institution: UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Language: English

Topic: Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,801

Funder: Norges Forskningsråd