Abstract
Collective synchrony is the simultaneous occurrence of behavior, cognition, emotion, and/or physiology within a group of three or more people. In this dissertation, I draw from various literatures to inform exploratory empirical and methodological investigation of collective synchrony in team sports. These include physiological synchrony, which has been examined primarily in dyads, and collective behavior in sports teams. In Manuscript 1, I present a conceptual framework of collective synchrony in team sports. I argue that three possible antecedents (copresence, shared task, and coordination) underlie the interindividual matching of emotion, behavior, and cognition. This matching contributes to collective behavioral synchrony and/or collective physiological synchrony. These are conceptualized as a coupled system due to the relationship between human movement and physiology. Collective flow, a collective psychological state that may include interindividual matching of emotion, behavior, and/or cognition, is included in the framework as a possible outcome of collective synchrony. In Manuscript 2, I provide a systematic review of 29 studies of collective synchrony. In this review, I decided to include not only studies on team sports, but also studies of collectives encompassing a variety of settings, substantive aims, variables of interest, and analytical methods. My review focuses on several characteristics of this multidisciplinary pool of articles including the (a) contexts, populations, and synchrony variables examined; (b) analytical methods used; and (c) notable findings reported. In Manuscript 3, I articulate and apply a regime-switching dynamic factor analytical approach to examine collective synchrony in collegiate men's and women's soccer teams. In Study 1, I analyze collective synchrony in two variables characterizing women's soccer players' movements during competitive games. In Study 2, I investigate collective synchrony in men's soccer teammates' changes in heart rate during small-sided practice games. Reporting on the results of these studies, I show how features of substantive interest, such as the magnitude and prevalence of collective synchrony, can be parameterized, interpreted, and aggregated. I highlight several key findings of these studies as well as opportunities for future research, in terms of methodological and substantive aims for advancing the study of collective synchrony. Results from an applied simulation, through which I tested the analytical approach on data with characteristics similar to that analyzed in Studies 1 and 2, supplementary tables and figures, and R software code are provided in the appendices.
Highlights
During competition, a sports team may collectively experience moments of failure or success, anxiety or exhilaration, threat or challenge, pressure or relative comfort
When a shared activity is goal-directed, the structural characteristics of the task may yield interindividual behavioral matching. This may contribute to collective physiological synchrony indirectly through collective behavioral synchrony due to the metabolic demands of teammates’ common physical activity, for example
Data streams that were analyzed for collective synchrony included motion, functional neuroimaging (EEG, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)), cardiovascular signals (HR, heart rate variability (HRV), respiration rate), other indicators of autonomic arousal, affective state, menstrual cycles, and shared awareness
Summary
A sports team may collectively experience moments of failure or success, anxiety or exhilaration, threat or challenge, pressure or relative comfort. Commentators often draw conclusions, from visual cues such as players’ body language, about the psyche of an entire team They make observations such as, “They really seem to be feeling the pressure ”. When people participate together in shared activities (e.g., sports, performing arts, social interactions), they may exhibit some of the same behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and physiological outcomes. The presence of such associations or interdependencies between multiple individuals has been referred to as synchrony [1, 2]. Teammates will at times exhibit similarities in various behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and physiological states Such simultaneous occurrences are known as synchrony [1, 2].
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