I Can See It in Your Face. Affective Valuation of Exercise in More or Less Physically Active Individuals

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to illustrate that people's affective valuation of exercise can be identified in their faces. The study was conducted with a software for automatic facial expression analysis and it involved testing the hypothesis that positive or negative affective valuation occurs spontaneously when people are reminded of exercise. We created a task similar to an emotional Stroop task, in which participants responded to exercise-related and control stimuli with a positive or negative facial expression (smile or frown) depending on whether the photo was presented upright or tilted. We further asked participants how much time they would normally spend for physical exercise, because we assumed that the affective valuation of those who exercise more would be more positive. Based on the data of 86 participants, regression analysis revealed that those who reported less exercise and a more negative reflective evaluation of exercise initiated negative facial expressions on exercise-related stimuli significantly faster than those who reported exercising more often. No significant effect was observed for smile responses. We suspect that responding with a smile to exerciserelated stimuli was the congruent response for the majority of our participants, so that for them no Stroop interference occurred in the exercise-related condition. This study suggests that immediate negative affective reactions to exercise-related stimuli result from a postconscious automatic process and can be detected in the study participants' faces. It furthermore illustrates how methodological paradigms from socialcognition research (here: the emotional Stroop paradigm) can be adapted to collect and analyze biometric data for the investigation of exercisers' and non-exercisers' automatic valuations of exercise.

Using facial expressions instead of response keys in the implicit association test

“…Half of the photos showed exercising and half showed sedentary office work. The participants who were faster to frown toward non-exercise photos, in comparison to their frowning speed toward exercise photos, tended to report a higher number of weekly exercise sessions (Brand & Ulrich, 2019). Based on this initial evidence, in the present research, we developed an IAT with emotional facial responses, and tested its viability as an indirect measure of evaluation.…”

“…Because questionnaires are limited by people's understanding of the question and their ability and motivation to respond accurately, psychologists developed indirect measures of evaluation that do not require participants to report their evaluation of the target objects. One category of indirect measures, the socalled "implicit measures" (Brownstein et al, 2019;Gawronski & De Houwer, 2014;Smith & Ratliff, 2015), includes mostly tasks that require participants to categorize stimuli to categories based on the meaning of the stimuli. The ease of categorization in those tasks is sensitive to people's evaluation of the stimuli.…”

Sponsor message processing in live broadcasts—A pilot study on the role of game outcome uncertainty and emotions

“…likelihood of occurrence of defined positive valence facial actions) to −100 (max. likelihood of occurrence of defined negative valence facial actions; Brand & Ulrich, 2019).…”

Anticipatory and Anticipated Emotions in Regular and Non-regular Exercisers – A Qualitative Study

“…Another interesting methodical aspect would be to assess participants' facial expressions to take them into account when analyzing participants' statements about emotions. Previous research suggests that negative affective exercise valuations were related to negative facial expressions on exercise-related stimuli especially in less active people (Brand and Ulrich, 2019). Thus, the application of facial expression recognition (e.g., in form of a software) could increase the rigor and quality in qualitative emotion research.…”