An Evolutionary Approach to Emotions in Sports

Abstract

Emotions play an important role in sport and are probably one of the reasons why so many people are engaged in and watch sports. Somewhat surprisingly, the majority of research on emotions in sports has focused on anxiety and stress – emotional states that many people would not intuitively associate with the majority of emotional and affective experiences in sports. The influential emotion researcher Richard Lazarus criticises the fact that research on anxiety and stress has been carried out relatively isolated from research on emotions in general, and has led to two fairly independent bodies of literature: “Stress is important in its own right, but emotion encompasses all of the important phenomena of stress. I believe the emotions provide a far richer understanding of the adaptational struggles of human and infrahuman animals”. Following from this observation, this chapter will provide an evolutionary account of emotions and critically evaluate the potential of this theoretical framework for the context of sports. The chapter will further give an overview of newly emerging research on the expressive component of emotions in sport (body language and nonverbal behaviour) that has been motivated from evolutionary theorising and outline how important insights have emerged from this theoretical approach.