The role of anticipated affect in the context of physical activity: a scoping review

ABSTRACT

Individuals often anticipate how they will feel during a potential future behaviour. Assuming that this anticipation may influence actual behaviour, the aim of this scoping review was to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on the role of anticipated affect in the context of physical activity. Thus, relationships between anticipated affect and (1) other psychological variables related to physical activity or (2) physical activity behaviour were analysed. Five data bases were searched for studies involving anticipated affect of physical activity, resulting in 33 relevant studies. The results were clustered into five categories. (1a) Anticipated affect was related to intention and (1b) to affective experiences. However, a forecasting error appeared in several studies showing that participants underestimated how positive their emotions during or after physical activity actually were. (2a) Due to a low number of studies, it remains unclear whether anticipated affect can predict future physical activity behaviour directly. (2b) Intervention studies with physical activity as the dependent variable and (2c) as the independent variable revealed promising approaches to facilitate positive anticipated affect regarding future physical activity. Future research should consider cognitive biases in affective forecasting studies and develop validated questionnaires for studying anticipated affect of physical activity.

KEYWORDS:

• anticipation
• affect
• emotions
• mood
• physical activity
• exercise

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Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this article are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2023.2284473).

Notes

* The description of ‘anticipatory emotions’ in the paper matched our understanding of anticipated emotions, even though today, these two terms are defined differently (for a more detailed distinction see Feil et al. 2022 or Williams et al. 2019).

* The sample of this study was a subsample of Janssen et al. 2018.