Abstract
Studies have increasingly found that the aggression level of contact athletes is higher than that of non-athletes. Given that higher aggression levels are associated with worse behavioral inhibition and that athletes show better behavioral inhibition than non-athletes, it is unclear why contact athletes would exhibit higher aggression levels. Emotion, especially anger, is an important factor in the generation of aggressive behavior, and anger has been shown to affect behavioral inhibition. Thus, the present study examined the influence of anger on behavioral inhibition in contact athletes. An implicit emotional Go/No-go task was used that contained 50 anger-associated words and 50 neutral words as stimuli. Participants were asked to execute a key press depending on the explicit color of word and to ignore any (implicit) emotional information associated with the word. The results showed a significant interaction in performance accuracy on the No-go task between emotion (i.e., anger-associated words versus neutral words) and group (athlete versus non-athlete). The performance accuracy of the contact athletes on anger-associated stimuli was significantly lower than that for neutral stimuli. Evoked delta and theta oscillations were analyzed at the time windows 200–600 and 200–400 ms respectively in both groups. A time-frequency analysis indicated a significant interaction between group, emotion and task for both evoked delta and theta oscillations. Post hoc analyses showed that stronger evoked delta and theta oscillations were evoked during the presentation of anger-associated stimuli compared with neutral stimuli on the No-go task in athletes. By contrast, no other significant effect was found in the control group or between the control and athlete groups. These results indicate that time-frequency analysis can effectively distinguish conventional ERP components and that implicit anger significantly weakens behavioral inhibition in contact athletes but not in non-athletes.
Highlights
Physical or verbal conflicts are appearing in various sports with increasing frequency
Multivariate repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) were computed on evoked delta oscillation and evoked theta oscillation using emotion, task (Go and No-go) as withinsubject factors and group as between-subject factors
The results showed that for the athlete group, the power in the evoked delta and theta oscillations during the presentation of anger-associated stimuli were stronger than those for neutral stimuli in the No-go task, suggesting that when athletes executed behavioral inhibition during a stimulus associated with anger, greater evoked delta and theta activities were evoked
Summary
Physical or verbal conflicts are appearing in various sports with increasing frequency. Researchers found that individuals with high aggression or impulsivity levels tend to have poor behavioral inhibition (Vigilcolet and Codorniuraga, 2004; Chen et al, 2005; Krämer et al, 2011; Pawliczek et al, 2013; Dambacher et al, 2015; Messerotti et al, 2015; Micai et al, 2015; Verona and Bresin, 2015). These results have suggested that the poorer the individual’s behavioral inhibition ability, the easier it is to initiate aggressive behavior. This leads to the question of why athletes would be more aggressive if they have better behavioral inhibition
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