Emotional Responses to the Sports Page

Spectators' emotional responses during actual competitions and attributions for game outcomes have been previously examined. In the current research, emotional responses of fans either high or low in identification with a team were measured after they simply read a newspaper article written by another fan of their team or a fan of a competing team. The author was described as either loyal or disloyal to his own team following a competition that was either won or lost in overtime. As hypothesized, persons with varying degrees of identification with the team exhibited different patterns of reactions to the article. For highly identified persons, the most positive mood state followed exposure to a sports article that described a victory for the ingroup whose author was also an admitted loyal fan of the same team. The most negative affect was evoked when the author of the article was a disloyal fan of the subjects' favorite team and the competition was lost. This pattern was not found for individuals low in identification with the team. They were not significantly influenced by the game outcome, group membership of the author, or the author's degree of commitment to the team. Implications for research on sports spectators, exposure to sports news, and emotion regulation are discussed.