A new study by researchers at the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE) has determined that body-focused emotions have a direct impact on a person’s ability to perform or learn a movement task.
Men and women participated in the study by first completing a relived emotion task where they were asked to recall and write about a time they experienced being either proud or embarrassed about their bodies. After writing down this story, they completed a movement task.
“Overall, participants in the embarrassed group performed worse than the participants in the proud group, suggesting that evoking negative emotions about the body negatively impacted performance,” says Jude Bek, a post-doctoral fellow in KPE, who co-authored the study with Professors Catherine Sabiston and Tim Welsh, and PhD candidate Delaney Thibodeau.
The study, published in the Body Image journal, also found that the negative impact of embarrassment appeared to be stronger in men than women. Specifically, reliving body-related embarrassment showed greater impact on movement time in men, and on accuracy on the task in women.
“I was surprised to see a stronger effect of embarrassment in the men, but it is possible that many women already have a heightened sense of body-related embarrassment, so this may have caused them to be less impacted by being asked to recall a time when they felt embarrassed about their body,” says Bek.
“I was also surprised that embarrassment had a stronger effect for men compared to women,” says Sabiston. “For men, the requirement to relive an embarrassing experience pertaining to their body may have elicited a stronger stress response and therefore greater attention bias that impacted motor performance.”
The study builds on previous work by Sabiston and Welsh aimed at testing the impact of body image factors on cognitive and motor performance outcomes. The main foundation of this work is the premise that these emotions generally lead people to attend to their body appearance and away from the task they are performing. This shift in focus means that they are likely to see detriments in their performance on tasks at hand.
“If they are focused on their body, they are not focused on the task and therefore the performance on the task could be impaired,” says Sabiston, who worked with Welsh on a study, which found that tight and revealing clothing negatively impacts motor performance compared to loose and concealing clothing.
“It is interesting to see emotions also having an impact on motor performance – such findings have been commonly observed in cognitive and academic tasks, but this is the first time it was shown in motor performance,” says Welsh. “We believe this finding could have impacts on learning and life-long participation in sports and physical activity.”
Sabiston’s research includes many studies that have shown that negative body image is related to drop-out from sports and physical activity due to decreased motivation to participate.
“Sport contexts are ripe with body-focused cues and stimuli – just think about uniform fit, spectator comments, coach feedback, teammate comparisons and narratives of idealized athletic body types central to success,” she says. “Recent public discourse from the Olympics and Paralympic Games also show athletes are often the targets of body-focused stimuli.”
If, as this new study suggests, motor performance and learning are also affected by this attention on the body, which is so highly prevalent in sport, this could be another reason for demotivation and underperformance. In other words, “no one wants to do something they can’t do or perform well,” says Welsh.
The researchers hope these findings will lead coaches and trainers to reconsider how they provide feedback – if making athletes feel embarrassed leads to decreased performance and learning during training and competition, it might also affect their motivation to stay involved and might also quell any positive benefits that sport participation can offer.
Sabiston says that coaches and sport parents or guardians are in the best position to make the change in sport culture through thoughtful and intentional communication that doesn’t focus on appearance, but rather on positive role modelling.
“Sport administrators can benefit from designing or allocating uniforms that de-emphasize the body shape and appearance and are comfortable, so they are not a constant focus for athletes,” she says. “Administrators can also reduce appearance-focused media, like posters and print material, in training and performance centres.
“And, athletes can benefit from an awareness of the impact that these body-focused stimuli and cues have on their performance by proactively engaging in stress management and coping strategies such as motivational self-talk, mindfulness and self-compassion practices.”
While these findings have implications for sport skill development and competence, the researchers suggest they may go beyond sport to other important achievement-focused domains such as academics. They also say this study makes clear the need to continue to include men in research focused on body image.
Up next, the researchers intend to delve deeper into the broader implications of negative body image resulting from excessive body scrutiny in sport, including injury risk.