Positive emotion in sport performance: current status and future directions

Abstract

Emotions have firmly established their place in sport psychology research over the past 40 years. For many decades following World War II, mainstream psychology researchers placed negative emotions (e.g., anxiety) ahead of positive emotions (e.g., happiness) but positive emotions are now a genuine, promising field of research because of their influence on specific components of performance (e.g., attention) and psychological well-being. The benefits of these emotions have hitherto not been wholly realized in a sport context, especially in their capacity to generate greater self-efficacy, motivation, attention, problem-solving, and coping with adversity. Although the sport emotion literature is sprinkled with studies that specifically examined positive emotion in sport settings, the breadth and depth of this research is too thin to make bold claims about the value of positive emotions in the emotion-performance relation. There are, however, at least three theoretical models available to sport psychologists to better understand the influence of positive emotions on sport performance and two of these models are specifically designed for sport contexts. Not only can these models deepen and widen this knowledge base, but they can also support interventions in applied settings to improve performance and psychological well-being.