The Nonverbal Communication of Winning and Losing: Are Emotional States Universally Expressed and Understood in Sport?

• Applicant: Dr. Philip Furley
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539562999

An important topic within psychology—on which there remains continued debate—regards the universality of certain nonverbal behaviors (NVB) and their corresponding interpretation. This project aims to use the context of sports to investigate whether winning and losing NVB are produced and understood the same way by different people across the world. Considering highly ambiguous research findings on the universality of NVB in general, and on winning and losing NVB in particular, the proposed research aims at contributing to important open questions and controversies in the fields of emotion and NVB. More specifically, the research program aims to test competing theories against each other (basic emotion theory vs. behavioural ecology theory) and establish if winning and losing in different sport contexts is associated with universally expressed (encoded) and understood (decoded) NVB. Studies 1 and 2 examine the production of NVBs by athletes performing at the Olympic and Paralympic games in winning and losing situations with established manual and automated facial and bodily coding techniques. NVBs will be analysed as a function of different types of sport contests, athlete nationality, gender, and time of occurrence (during the contest, directly at the end of a contest, and after some time has elapsed). Study 3 investigates NVBs that occur in pre-match and disqualification conditions regardless of winning or losing, thereby serving as a control condition that can be used to interpret findings of study 1 and 2 that involve highly intense emotional states (winning and losing). The remaining studies (4a, 4b, and 4c) examine how these NVBs produced by Olympic and Paralympic athletes are interpreted or recognized by people from different cultural backgrounds. Studies 4a and 4b compare the use of snapshot images and videos to understand whether the method of presenting the NVB (image or video) affects the interpretation. Finally, study 4c investigates whether the occlusion of contextual information within the athletic broadcast footage affects the interpretation of NVBs. In general, convergence in emotional expression (encoding) and interpretation (decoding) owing to cultural context would point to universality. Specifically, intense emotional states like winning and losing (studies 1 and 2) may show higher levels of convergence than other match conditions (study 3). Conversely, divergence in expression and interpretation of NVBs would point toward culturally-learned, non-universality in NVBs. Finally, all these findings will be integrated with the help of a Brunswikian lens model that will help develop reasons for convergence and divergence in NVBs. With its relation to human expression and perception, this project could have potential applications much beyond sport or physical performance, helping us further understand how human beings interact and convey different types of information in different cultures across the world.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants