Mickaël Campo

Emotions and performance in rugby

Purpose This study investigated emotion–performance relationships in rugby union. We identified which emotions rugby players experienced and the extent to which these emotions were associated with performance, considering how emotions unfold over the course of a game, and whether the game was played at home or away. Methods Data were gathered from 22 professional male rugby union players using auto-confrontation interviews to help identify situations within games when players experienced intense emotions. We assessed the intensity of emotions experienced before each discrete performance and therefore could assess the emotion–performance relationship within a competition. Results Players identified experiencing intense emotions at 189 time-points. Experts in rugby union rated the quality of each performance at these 189 time-points on a visual analog scale. A Linear Mixed Effects model to investigate emotion–performance relationships found additive effects of game location, game time, and emotions on individual performance. Conclusion Results showed 7 different pre-performance emotions, with high anxiety and anger associating with poor performance. Future research should continue to investigate emotion–performance relationships during performance using video-assisted recall and use a measure of performance that has face validity for players and coaches alike.

Emotion–performance relationships in team sport: The role of personal and social identities

In the field of emotion–performance relationship in achievement situations, the social dimensions of emotions have been understudied. Thus, recent advances highlighted the need to explore identity processes to know whether group belonging may influence individuals’ emotions and performance when they are involved in a task-group. The current study introduced an innovative approach to continuously capture the variability of emotions (pleasant and unpleasant), identity levels (personal and social) and performances (individual and collective) experienced during volleyball games. Six elite players (M = 20.14 years; SD = 1.25) volunteered to participate in this research. For the purpose of this study, a program based on the Mouse Paradigm methodological approach was elaborated. A total of 9461 momentary assessments (M = 1576.83 ± 94.38 per participant) was gathered for each of the aforementioned variables. Results of hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed a partial independence between social and personal identity, as well as an effect of identity levels on unpleasant emotions. Results also highlighted that neither identity levels nor emotions influenced individual performances. Taken together, these results were discussed in terms of theoretical and methodological advances that allow to deepen the understanding of emotions–performance relationships in the context of team-sports.