Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Affiliation to a sports team constitutes a complex social phenomenon. Watching a team playing can elicit intense emotions from frustration to amusement, fostering strong group identities among fans. It is believed these fans’ emotional responses are strongly influenced by factors like levels of identification with the team, teams’ gender, and uncertainty of the game’s outcome. This research aimed to understand the dynamics of the emotional experience of sports fans and its relation to the emergence of collective behavior. Teams in many modalities have been exploring the potential of arousal to create interpersonal synchrony among fans and to shape participation. The study was conducted during the 2016-2017 basketball season, with 215 fans. Participants filled questionnaires and wore during the events portable sensors that measured physiological and behavioral responses. The Sample Entropy analysis (SampEn) accessed the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) through the structural variability of participants. Game competitiveness, athletes’ game actions, team gender, game time structure, and individual characteristics were tested as predictors of HRV. Results indicate the increased differences in scores allied to advanced game time lead to increase in SampEn and HRV due to the decrease in the attention towards the game. The level of identification of the participant with the team, the gender, the knowledge about basketball rules, and the team gender did not seem to influence the SampEn. This result corroborates the multiple recurrence quantification analysis applied to extract the levels of heart rate synchronization in each game. Overall, the participants’ recurrence patterns were similar: 3% for the men’s game and 5% for the women’s game. Understand the emotional experience of the fans might be relevant for grasping the peculiarities of the interpersonal complex system of fanship.