“The Thrill of Victory . . . and the Agony of Defeat”: Passion and Emotional Reactions to Success and Failure Among Recreational Golfers

Abstract

The dualistic model of passion proposes two distinct forms of passion: obsessive (OP) and harmonious (HP). The purpose of this research was to test if emotional reactivity following athletic successes and failures was related to one's levels of HP and OP for sport. The authors recruited recreational golfers (N = 115) to report how they typically felt after they experienced successes and failures on the golf course. Results of multilevel modeling analyses supported the hypotheses and revealed that OP moderated the effects of success and failure on both positive and negative affect: OP was associated with higher levels of positive affect following success, as well as higher levels of negative affect following failure. These results suggest that OP, but not HP, is associated with greater emotional reactivity to the experience of success and failure in sport.

The Call of the Wild: How Extremism Happens

“…Obsessively (hence, motivationally imbalanced) passionate recreational golfers have been found to exhibit particularly high levels of positive affect after success in their golf game and high levels of negative affect after failure (Verner-Filion et al, 2018). The life happiness of workaholics depends primarily on how satisfied they are with their work (Ng et al, 2007).…”

We Are the Champions, But How Do We Respond? Savoring and Dampening in Response to Championship Victories Among Passionate Sports Fans

“…This allowed us to estimate models using robust maximum likelihood estimation and handle a very small amount of missing data using the default method of full information maximum likelihood (there were no missing responses with the LFC fans and less than 0.10% missing with WBB fans). With each sample, we tested a model that included (a) both savoring and dampening as dependent variables, (b) both HP and OP as independent variables in order to account for overlapping variance between them (Curran et al, 2015), and (c) the positivity of the victory as a covariate because both passion types have been shown to predict different emotional reactions in sport (e.g., Verner-Filion et al, 2018). This model and the results from both samples are displayed in Figure 1.…”

“…This way of engaging in an activity should predict less savoring because it triggers processes that impede savoring behavior, including activity conflict (Vallerand, Paquet, Philippe, & Charest, 2010), concentration difficulties (Philippe et al, 2009), and less mindfulness (St-Louis et al, 2018). In fact, OP could predict greater dampening because of a need to retain control during emotional highs (Verner-Filion, Schellenberg, Rapaport, Bélanger, & Vallerand, 2018), a desire to manage expectations, or even because of the superstitious belief that enjoying positive emotions will cause something bad to occur (e.g., Miyamoto & Ma, 2011).…”

Savoring and Dampening with Passion: How Passionate People Respond when Good Things Happen

“…Theoretical arguments can be made for OP being either a negative or positive predictor of dampening. On the one hand, passionate activities come to dominate the self-concept of those with high levels of OP, causing people's emotional experiences, self-esteem, and even life satisfaction to become contingent on performance in the activity (Lafrenière, St-Louis, Vallerand, & Donahue, 2012;Mageau, Carpentier, & Vallerand, 2011;Verner-Filion, Schellenberg, Rapaport, Bélanger, & Vallerand, 2018). Given the high stakes of activity engagement, highly obsessive people may engage in less dampening in response to positive events in order to allow themselves to feel all the positive emotions that can be experienced during good times.…”

“…On the other hand, it is possible that OP predicts greater dampening. With the stakes of activity engagement being so high, people with high levels of OP may dampen their positive emotions as part of an ongoing effort to control the emotional highs and lows of activity engagement (e.g., Verner-Filion et al, 2018), to avoid raising expectations about future event outcomes, or because positive feelings are perceived as not being useful for the attainment of important long-term goals (Tamir, 2009). Also, given that superstitious thinking is a characteristic of OP (Vallerand et al, 2008, Study 1), highly obsessive people may dampen positive emotions because they hold a common dialectical belief that explains cultural differences in dampening responses: enjoying positive events increases the chances of something bad happening (Miyamoto & Ma, 2011).…”