In this sense, core affect is constantly running in the background, changing in response to internal processes or changes in the environment ( Russell, 2015). However, a person can become conscious of it when attention is drawn to it. It represents a continuous assessment of one’s current state, which is outside the person’s awareness most of the time.

The core effect can be experienced as free-floating and is often associated with prototypical emotional episodes ( Russell, 2003 di Fronso et al., 2020). displeasure), and arousal, as an activation level (sleepy-activated).

It consists of the two components valence, as a hedonic quality (pleasure vs. Core affect represents simple and rapid valuations that something is good or bad, that you like or dislike something, that you feel pleasure or displeasure. According to Russell (2003), it is important to differentiate core affect from full-fledged emotions. In emotion research, a major problem lies in the often unclear use of terms, such as mood, emotions, or affect ( Ekkekakis and Petruzzello, 2000). Knowledge of the role of emotions during sports competitions can contribute to a better understanding of human behavior regulation in general, which in turn can serve practitioners in supporting athletes more effectively in their efforts to regulate emotions ( Wagstaff, 2014). In fact, the emotional roller coasters in sports competitions are one of the main reasons that make sport so fascinating, both for the athletes and the spectators. Because athletes often pursue personally relevant goals with uncertain outcomes, extreme states of positive and negative emotions can occur ( Hanin, 2007). Sports competitions can have a deep impact on the emotional life of athletes. To study the development of affective processes, future research should test the assumptions in ecologically valid contexts, such as real competitions or competition-like situations, using multi-component measures of emotions. Consequences for research and practice are derived and discussed. It assumes that the peculiarities of different sports must be taken into account in order to understand the affective processes, and offers starting points on which strategies can be used to effectively regulate affective states. The theory stresses the dynamics of affective processes and describes the consequences for performance in competitive sports. Based on Scherer’s component process model, we postulate six components of emotion that interact with each other in a circular fashion: (I) triggering processes, (II) physiological reactions, (III) action tendencies, (IV) expressive behaviors, (V) subjective experience, and (VI) higher cognitive processes. The theory focusses on how affective processes emerge and develop during competitive sport involvement.

In this article, we introduce a theory on the dynamic development of affective processes, affect regulation, and the relationship between emotions and sport performance. 2Department for Psychology and Education, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Suffolk, Ipswich, United Kingdom.1Department for Health Education and Sport Psychology, Institute for Sport and Sport Science, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.Darko Jekauc 1* Julian Fritsch 1 Alexander T.

Affective processes