Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Publication Title

Frontiers in Psychology

Abstract

Introduction: Both appraisal emotion approaches and self-regulation theory emphasize that appraising an event as conducive or detrimental to one’s current goals may trigger an affective response that can be observed nonverbally. Because there may be a female advantage in the inhibition and self-regulation of emotions, we hypothesized that female but not male athletes regulate emotions during sports through explicit nonverbal behaviors. Methods: All nonverbal hand movement behavior of right-handed female and male tennis athletes was recorded during competitive matches. All immediate nonverbal expressions after point losses and wins were coded by two independent blind raters applying the NEUROpsychological GESture (NEUROGES®) system. Results: No gender differences were found for overall hand movement activity. Female athletes executed more fall gestures than males as well as in space and both-handed act as a unit hand movements. In contrast to males, female athletes spent significantly more time with both-handed pantomime gestures (e.g., performing an imaginary backhand), particularly when losing points. Discussion: Increased expressions of pantomime gestures in female athletes after losing indicate that women regulate negative emotions nonverbally through explicit hand movements. Thus, female athletes seem to nonverbally cope with their negative emotional arousal through explicit nonverbal behaviors in order to control performance.

Keywords

emotions, gender, gestures, nonverbal movement behavior, sports

Volume

15

DOI

10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1526542

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© 2025 Adams, Augenstein, Furley, Krieg, Born and Helmich.

Version

Version of Record

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