Sport-Related Affective Benefits for Teenagers Are Getting Greater as They Approach Adulthood: A Large-Scale French Investigation.

Annie Carton,Camille Amoura,Hervé Ovigneur,Jérémy Coquart,Gabor Orosz,Alexis Barbry

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.738343

Abstract

The present investigation examined how sports club membership is related to adolescents’ daily negative and positive affects as they age. Robust prior results demonstrated that sports club membership is positively related to positive affect and negatively related to negative affect. However, surprisingly, no prior studies examined whether these benefits are consistently present throughout the teenage years or there are certain critical periods when teenagers can affectively profit more from being members of a sports club. The present cross-sectional investigation examined these questions on a comprehensive sample of French adolescents (N=17,337, female=7,604, aged between 10 and 18, Mage=12.45years, SDage=1.94years). Besides the expected affective benefits of a sports club membership, there was no interaction between age and negative affect. However, late adolescents reported greater daily positive affective benefits of sports club membership than early adolescents. These results suggest that late adolescents can use the extra affective benefits of sports club membership to gain advantages for the first steps of their adult life, such as coping with career start or transition to higher education. These results can provide guidelines for future studies to prioritize late adolescents with heightened positive sport-related affective benefits. It can also be useful information to promote sport among late adolescents.

Highlights

In the past 20 years, robust results suggest that regular participation in physical activity and sport has a beneficial effect on physical and mental health at all ages and for a broad variety of people (Biddle and Mutrie, 2001; Haworth and Lewis, 2005; Eime et al, 2013; Gisladottir et al, 2013b)
Negative Affect Adolescents who did not belong to any sports clubs experienced more negative affects their peers belonging to a sports club, β = −0.09, t(17,337) = −4.33, 95%CI (−0.13; −0.04), p < 0.001, d = 0.09
Positive Affect Those respondents who indicated their sports club participation, experienced more positive affects in the few days before the assessment than their peers, β = 0.20, 95%CI (0.16; 0.24), t(17,337) = 9.83, p < 0.001, d = 0.20

Summary

Introduction

In the past 20 years, robust results suggest that regular participation in physical activity and sport has a beneficial effect on physical and mental health at all ages and for a broad variety of people (Biddle and Mutrie, 2001; Haworth and Lewis, 2005; Eime et al, 2013; Gisladottir et al, 2013b). The lack of physical activity during adolescence is correlated with poor mental health (Hume et al, 2011; Gunnel et al, 2016) All in all, it appears that physical activity and sport have a positive impact on mental health and this is especially true regarding hedonic wellbeing (maximizing positive emotions and minimizing negative ones, Diener, 2000). The broaden-and-build theoretical framework (Fredrickson, 2001) posits that positive emotions have various beneficial effects on psychological functioning and we suppose that it can provide an explanation why and how adolescents can gradually benefit from sports club membership. According to this theory, positive emotions increase physical, personal, and social resources that mobilize and unleash their potentials. Positive emotions accumulate over time in ways that incrementally build people’s enduring resources

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Conclusion