Emotions and Performance: A Quasi Natural Experiment from the FIFA World Cup

Abstract

Emotions are intrinsic components of human behavior that have the capacity to affect how individuals perform in their daily activities. Much of the literature has explored the topic using experimental data or, when using sporting events, focusingon pre-competition triggers. This paper uses, granular, event-level data from the 2018 FIFA football World Cup to study for the first time how observed and naturally induced emotions impact performance as measured by each player's passing ability. The quasi-natural experimental set up is rich enough to study the influence of positive and negative emotions and their duration. The paper finds that negative emotions harm performance between 3 to 9 minutes after the trigger. At the same time,there is weak evidence that positive emotions also constrain performance, but only between 6 to 8 minutes after the trigger event.