Abstract
Sports fans are often passionate for their favourite team, league, or sport. However, the quality of engagement in a passion depends greatly on whether the passion is more harmonious or obsessive (Vallerand et al., 2003). Research has examined how both passion types are related to components of the stress process (Schellenberg, Gaudreau, & Crocker, 2013), and the purpose of this research was to study how passionate fans had appraised and coped with a rare setback: the postponement of their favourite sport. We examined if harmonious and obsessive passion for watching hockey were differentially related to stress experiences during the 2012-2013 National Hockey League (NHL) lockout. During the lockout, cross-sectional data were collected from 256 undergraduate hockey fans. Participants completed online questionnaires measuring passion types, stress appraisals, coping, and how they attended to lockout-related information. Results revealed that obsessive passion was positively associated with stress appraisals, most types of coping, and with avoiding information about the lockout. Harmonious passion was unrelated to stress appraisals, showed few relationships with coping, and was positively related with monitoring lockout-related information. Structural equation modeling supported a model whereby threat appraisal mediated the relationship between obsessive passion and disengagement-oriented coping. This pattern of results suggests that the extent to which the lockout was perceived as a distressing situation, requiring one to regulate thoughts, emotions, and incoming lockout-related information, depended on the extent to which one’s passion for hockey was obsessive rather than harmonious.Acknowledgments: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada