The Influence Of Anger On Athletes' Behavioral Inhibition Ability And Motivational System

Athletes often undergo violent acts such as physical collisions and conflicts on the playing field,and these acts not only cause serious harm to the parties,but also greatly affect the social atmosphere.The General Aggression Model(GAM)indicates that the emotional route of aggressive behavior processing includes anger,hostile feelings,or general negative emotions.It can be seen that the generation of aggressive behavior cannot be separated from emotions.Moreover,a study has also proved that not all negative emotions,but only anger can predict aggressive behavior.This shows that anger is an important factor in the generation of aggressive behavior.The three-dimensional theory of emotion defines anger as a kind of negative emotion;at the same time,the motivational dimensional model of affect points out that anger is a kind of emotion closely related to behavioral approach motivation.As a negative emotion,anger,like other negative emotions,weakens the individual's behavioral inhibition ability;as an emotion that is significantly related to the approach motivation,when the anger stimulus appears,it will significantly increase the individual's approach motivation.Therefore,this study expects to explore the influence of these two characteristics of anger on athletes.Experiment 1 used emotional Go/No-go task to examine the effect of anger on behavioral inhibition ability of athletes with 50 angry words and 50 neutral words as stimuli materials.The task requires the participants to determine the color of the vocabulary,perform corresponding key presses or suppressing the response of the key according to different colors.The two-factor(group*emotion)repeated measures analysis of variance showed no significant difference in Go task response.There is a significant interaction on accuracy of No-go task[F(1,28)=4.735,P=0.038].The simple effect analysis showed that the athletes' correct rate under the anger inhibition was significantly lower than the neutral inhibition.EEG time-frequency analysis results showed that there are obvious delta and theta activities within the time window of traditional N2 components within 200-300ms.The results showed that there were significant interaction between group and emotion in the delta oscillation and theta oscillation[F(1,28)=6.557,P=0.016;F(1,28)=4.234,P=0.049],and simple effect analysis showed that compared to neutral inhibition,athletes show significantly greater oscillation in anger inhibition tasks.At the same time,there are obvious delta and theta activities in the time window of the traditional P3 component within 300-500ms.There are also significant interactions[F(1,28)=4.488,P=0.043;F(1,28)=5.790,P = 0.023].The results of the simple effect analysis also showed that compared to neutral inhibition,athletes showed significantly greater oscillation in anger inhibition tasks.Experiment 2 used the Manikin task,a paradigm measuring of approach-avoidance behavior,to examine the effect of anger on athletes' motivation.The experiment included two tasks.In Task One,participants should approach angry words and avoiding neutral words.That was,when the angry word appeared,participants should move the manikin on the screen to the angry word through pressing key.When the neutral word appears,the manikin should be moved away from the word.The operation in Task Two is the opposite.Two-factor(group x task)repeated measures analysis of variance showed that the main effect of the task was significant[F(1,28)= 15.831,P=0.000],and the response time of Task One was significantly smaller than Task Two.And the interaction between the two factors was significant[F(1,28)= 4.322,P=0.047].The simple effect analysis found that the athletes' reaction in Task One was significantly smaller than Task Two,which means although both groups had a smaller reaction in Task One,athletes performed more significantly.The time-frequency analysis of EEG showed that the interaction between the two factors was significant(F(1,28)=4.622,P=0.040).The simple effect analysis showed that the theta oscillation activity induced in the Task Two was significantly greater than Task One.Conclusions:(1)Anger can weaken the behavior inhibition ability of the athletes,so that they need to put more effort into suppressing the anger stimulus;(2)Anger can induce a higher level of approach motivation for athletes,which leads to a faster approach to anger stimulus.