Reciprocal within-day associations between incidental affect and exercise: An EMA study

Abstract

Previous research suggests that how people feel throughout the course of a day (i.e. incidental affect) is predictive of exercise behaviour. A mostly separate literature suggests that exercise can lead to more positive incidental affect.

Objective: This study examines the potential reciprocal effects of incidental affect and exercise behaviour within the same day.

Design: Fifty-nine low-active (exercise <60 min/week), overweight (BMI: 25.0–39.9) adults (ages 18–65) participated in a six-month print-based exercise promotion programme.

Main outcome measures: Ecological momentary assessment was used to record self-reported exercise sessions in real time and incidental affective valence (feeling good/bad) as assessed by the 11-point Feeling Scale at random times throughout the day.

Results: Use of a within-subjects cross-lagged, autoregressive model showed that participants were more likely to exercise on days when they experienced more positive incidental affect earlier in the day (b = .58, SE = .10, p < .01), and participants were more likely to experience more positive incidental affect on days when they had exercised (b = .26, SE = .03, p < .01), with the former association significantly stronger than the latter (t = 23.54, p < .01).

Conclusion: The findings suggest a positive feedback loop whereby feeling good and exercising are reciprocally influential within the course of a day.

Keywords:

• exercise
• incidental affect
• ecological momentary assessment

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Bess Marcus and Beth Bock for use of their print-based exercise promotion intervention. Special thanks to Jason Frezza for EMA programming, David Upegui and Laura Dionne for data management, and Fred Holloway and Jane Wheeler for research assistance.

Notes

1. We explored the effects of controlling for latency (log transformed to handle skewness) in the model. Results did not suggest a significant main effect of latency, nor a significant change in the estimated cross-lagged effects after controlling for latency. Thus we removed it from the final model.