A COMPARISON OF POST-EXERCISE MOOD ENHANCEMENT ACROSS COMMON EXERCISE DISTRACTION ACTIVITIES

Abstract

Mood enhancement from exercise may occur due to distraction as proposed by the “time-out” hypothesis (Berger & Motl, 2000). It appears that a viable explanation for short-term mood enhancement from various exercise activities may come from distraction characteristics of the activity. A new direction for exercise-mood research that has recently been advocated (Berger & Motl, 2000) is on environmental influences and their capacity to increase activity enjoyment and stimulate greater distractibility during exercise. PURPOSE: To compare the mood alteration and perceptual appraisal of effort during exercise under standardized distraction activities (television watching and reading) with exercise in a non-distraction condition. METHODS: Fifty-three college age students were randomly assigned to; exercise while reading, exercise while watching television, or exercise control conditions. Participants completed a pre-exercise POMS after 5 minutes quiet rest, rode an electronically-braked cycle ergometer for 25 minutes at 60–75% of individual heart rate reserve (HRR), and completed a post-exercise POMS after 5 minutes post-exercise quiet rest. Ratings of perceived exertion (Borg, 1985) were collected every 5 minutes. RESULTS: A dependent t-test indicated that exercise improved mood from pre- to post exercise (t(53)= 2.71, p < .001). Results of a one-way MANOVA comparing conditions on POMS subscale change scores indicated a nonsignificant overall exercise condition effect. A one-way MANCOVA, using exercise conditions as independent variables and pre-exercise POMS subscale scores as covariates was also nonsignificant. Results of a 3 × 5 (condition × RPE assessment) repeated measures ANOVA were also nonsignificant. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that it may be the enjoyable characteristics of distraction and not distraction per se, that are important to post-exercise mood enhancement. It was concluded that may mediate mood changes and that distraction activity during exercise should contain enjoyable, self-motivating content.