Affective Evaluations of Exercising: The Role of Automatic-Reflective Evaluation Discrepancy

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Behavioral Science
• Exercise Science

Background:

• Automatic and reflective evaluations can diverge, impacting behavior.
• The associative-propositional processes in evaluation model (APP) explains dual-process evaluation.
• Understanding these processes is key to exercise behavior research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel method for assessing automatic and reflective affective evaluations of exercise.
• To investigate the relationship between discrepancies in these evaluations and exercise behavior.
• To explore the implications of dual-process evaluation for exercise goal setting.

Main Methods:

• Participants' automatic exercise evaluations were measured.
• Participants were informed of their automatic evaluations and asked to reflect.
• Discrepancy between automatic and reflective evaluations was assessed.
• Self-reported ideal and actual exercise frequency were recorded.

Main Results:

• A significant regression was found between evaluation discrepancy and exercise frequency mismatch.
• A negative automatic evaluation coupled with a positive reflective evaluation predicted a larger gap between ideal and actual exercise.
• This suggests that overriding negative automatic responses with positive reflective ones inflates exercise goals.

Conclusions:

• A dual-process approach effectively measures evaluative responses to exercise.
• Mistrusting negative spontaneous exercise reactions and adopting overly positive reflective evaluations leads to inflated exercise goals.
• This highlights the importance of aligning automatic and reflective evaluations for realistic behavioral intentions.