Performance-related emotions in skilled athletes: hedonic tone and functional impact

Idiosyncratic, performance-related emotions were identified in 32 track and field athletes and 34 figure skaters following the lines of the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning model. The model is an idiographic, individual-oriented approach recognizing the beneficial or detrimental effects of emotions depending on the individual's perception. In developing optimal and dysfunctional profiles of individual emotions, the athlete is required to identify the positive (pleasant) and negative (unpleasant) emotions having facilitating or debilitating effects upon performance; however, while the individual's perception of facilitating-debilitating effects of emotions (the functional impact) is emphasized, pleasant or unpleasant characteristics of emotions are usually established a priori by the researcher. In this investigation, participants were requested both to recognize facilitating-debilitating effects of emotions and to classify them as pleasant or unpleasant. The main goal was to ascertain whether the athlete's experience of positive and negative performance-related emotions (the hedonic tone) would be different from the conventional labeling of affect. Analyses showed that different facilitating or inhibiting emotions were experienced as pleasant (23.38%), unpleasant (33.77%), or both (42.86%). Further, positive or negative emotions were functionally facilitating (12.99%), inhibiting (19.48%), or both (67.53%). Therefore, athletes perceived emotions not only as facilitating or debilitating but also as positive or negative depending on idiosyncratic meaning and intensity. The study of the functional influence of emotions as well as their hedonic tone may have important practical implications.