On Monday, I wrote about the remarkable sportsman, Graeme Obree and his incredible performance in beating the world hour record.
Graeme was an unusual sportsman with a gift for making his body fall in line with what his mind wanted to achieve. In an interview with Michael Hutchinson, he said that he would rather have died than failed at what he set out to achieve. So when I saw the title of this article “when winning is everything,” I just had to review it.
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When winning is everything
The full title of this research article is When winning is everything: on passion, identity and aggression in sport, by Donahue, Rip and Vallerand, Psychology of Sport and Exercise 10, 2009. The study set out to examine the interplay between the different types of passion that athletes display and their incidence of aggressive behavior in sports.
The authors built up a model to explain how certain types of passion for sport could generate aggressive behaviours. They suggested that obessive passion would yield aggressive actions, whereas harmonious passion would not. Then they went away and did a collection of studies to test whether this was the case.
OK, so what’s obsessive passion and what’s harmonious passion?
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The difference between obsessive and harmonious passion
Obsessive and harmonious passion are terms associated with what is termed “The Dualistic Model of Passion”.
- Harmonious passion - is the result of an activity being seen by the athlete as important for itself without any contingencies attached to it. A harmonious passion occupies an important, but not overpowering, space in identity and is in harmony with other aspects of the person’s life.
- Obsessive passion - when an activity is internalized in a controlled way in a person’s identity, an obsessive passion is formed. A controlled internalization originates from external pressure, social acceptance or self-esteem, or because the sense of excitement derived from activity engagement becomes uncontrollable.
Basically, where you have a harmonious passion for a sport, you enjoy it and you gain satisfaction from it but it doesn’t define your self-worth or who you are.
Having an obsessive passion, however, means that you define yourself in terms of your ability at the sport and what you can achieve in it. Without wishing to cast myself as an amateur psychologist, I would put Graeme Obree into this category, as well as volatile personalities like John McEnroe.
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A quick brief on aggression
As far as sports psychologists are concerned, aggression is divided into two categories, instrumental and reactive aggression:
- Instrumental aggression – this is usually defined as causing a strategic nuisance to an opponent in a desire to hinder one’s performance, such as a box out in basketball or a legal body check in hockey.
- Reactive aggression – this involves frustration or anger along with the intent to harm or injure another. The primary goal is the resultant pain or suffering of the victim.
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How does passion connect with aggression?
Many psychologists have noted that aggression is more likely to take place when one’s sense of competence and identity has been threatened.
More specifically, some psychologists have proposed that aggressive behavior results from threatened egotism, (favourable views of the self being disputed by others). Aggression is sparked by the questioning of these favourable views.
Psychologists are also aware that when individuals have the opportunity to self-affirm or to focus on some of their competent personal skills or abilities before having their identity threatened, then they become less defensive about the threatening information.
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What the authors of the study thought
The authors of this study therefore suggested that obsessively-passionate individuals could be expected to show more aggression during playing their sport, because of how important it is to them to be good at that sport. Being good at the sport is part of their identity. They therefore proposed that under conditions of identity challenge, this aggression should be even more marked but under conditions of identity affirmation, it should be reduced.
In the study, the authors confirmed their hypotheses, as follows:
- They found that obsessively-passionate players were more likely to report aggressive behaviors than harmoniously-passionate players.
- When the identity of obsessively-passionate athletes was threatened, they found that they displayed higher levels of situational aggressive behaviors than harmoniously-passionate athletes.
- Finally, they found that when the opportunity to self-affirm beforehand was presented, the difference between the players went away.
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Identity threat and identity self-affirmation
I thought it was interesting that self-affirmation reduces aggressive behaviour in obsessive-passionate athletes. If you recall, I reviewed a study during my stress series that suggested that self-affirmation reduces stress.
I am not sure how to connect these two ideas but there is some common ground here, I am certain. Perhaps aggression is fundamentally defensive? I had always thought of it as an assertive psychological phenomenon but perhaps it is more closely aligned to the HPA-axis and cortisol production than to the fight-or-flight pathway.
