What would I look like if I didn't exercise? Can negative imagery be motivational in the exercise domain?

Abstract

Given that only 14% of adult women meet Canada's physical activity guidelines (Colley et al., 2011) understanding women's exercise motivations is important. Exercise imagery may be a promising skill used to change the exercise behavior of Canadian women. Recent focus groups conducted with female exercisers reported negative appearance imagery to be motivational in nature (Kossert & Munroe-Chandler, 2008). This finding is contrary to suggestions that negative imagery has deleterious effects on motor performance and is therefore discouraged. Similar to the self-talk literature in which negative self-talk has been found to be motivational in both sport and exercise settings (Hardy, 2006; Hardy et al., 2001), imagery may indeed serve some of the same purposes.As such, there is a need to examine the direction (positive, negative) and motivation (facilitative, debilitative) of appearance-related images in female exercisers. The purpose was to develop a questionnaire to assess appearance imagery use and its motivational function, based on emergent themes from Kossert and Munroe-Chandler's focus groups, and a review of the relevant literature. The initial item pool, consisting of 49 items, was sent to five experts in the field of exercise imagery. The experts were asked to rate each item on its relevance to appearance imagery on a five point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = poor match to 5 = excellent match. The experts also indicated the direction and motivation of each item. Those items with a mean rating of 3.75 or higher were retained, resulting in an 18 item questionnaire.