Positive Affect

A major obstacle to engaging in physical activity is the rather negative (exhausting, painful) perception that we have of effort. However, the feeling of negative affects leads to avoidance behavior. In order to create in people the desire to return to a physical activity, it is necessary that they associate a certain level of positive affects with this activity. In other words, what drives action is the memory of a positive emotional experience. But how to associate sport and pleasure to inactive people?

Combining pleasure and physical exercise can first be done by developing your emotional intelligence, that is to say your ability to understand what you feel. To experience physical exercise with pleasure, the feelings experienced (breathing rate, heart rate, etc.) must correspond to the feelings imagined before the effort was made. A person going to perform a physical exercise should expect an increase in respiratory rate, heart rate, the appearance of redness... If he is not familiar with these elements, he will be worried about their appearance during physical exercise and will associate negative affects with it. On the other hand, if the anticipated sensory and emotional consequences are in line with those actually felt, physical activity (which leads to sweating, fatigue, aches) will be experienced as soothed. It will then be encoded as a positive event, a coding that will make you want to start over. This affective intelligence is linked to our experience, and it is possible to help people develop it. They will thus be able to discover the tolerance to the effort (ability to continue an exercise, when the feelings are less pleasant), and to be able to push back its threshold.

However, not everyone has the same emotional intelligence, and some people find it harder to imagine how they will feel. It is this category of people that the Sport Plaisir project is targeting. What levers can be used to associate inactive people, who do not spontaneously have this ability to predict their feelings, with positive affects during physical exercise? The project then works on the environmental factors that can help a person to be confident and to imagine that the session will be pleasant. Lights, sounds and smells can act as sensory rewards and motivate the individual to practice more intense physical activity, over a longer period of time than without these elements. Lasting 4 years, the project resulted in the creation of software (renamed Algo®) which, implemented in a sports product, leads to an interaction between this product and its user. Adapting in real time to the effort provided by the user, the sports product sends back positive rewards associated with this effort, and based on light, auditory and odor stimuli, emitted in its environment.