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Perceptions of social support influence adaptive self-regulatory processes that maintain health, produce feelings, and motivate behavior. Although associations between sociality and health are increasingly well-understood, there is little systematic research into the effects of social support on fatigue, physical discomfort, exertion, and output regulation in physical activity. We conducted an experimental study to investigate the effect of social support on performance and perceived difficulty in a handgrip force task while controlling for audience and reputational factors. Effects were compared with those of another established psychogenic performance enhancer (a placebo ergogenic supplement). During handgrip trials over varying levels of objective difficulty, participants viewed photographs of a support figure or stranger while in a placebo or control condition. Results revealed a significant main effect of the social support cue on handgrip performance outputs, and a significant interaction with objective trial difficulty – relative to the stranger cue, the support-figure cue significantly increased handgrip performance outputs and the effect was larger in more objectively difficult trials. Moreover, despite producing greater handgrip outputs, participants perceived trials to be significantly less difficult in the social support condition. Though there was a non-significant main effect of placebo (vs. control) on performance outputs, participants perceived trials in the placebo condition to be significantly less difficult. The research contributes new evidence and theory on the role of perceived social support – an important (energetic) resource – in human performance and motivates further enquiry into how cues to support alter perceived effort and performance outputs in strenuous physical challenges.

In June 2017 a group of experts in anthropology, biology, kinesiology, neuroscience, physiology, and psychology convened in Canterbury, UK, to address questions relating to the placebo effect in sport and exercise. The event was supported exclusively by Quality Related (QR) funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The funder did not influence the content or conclusions of the group. No competing interests were declared by any delegate. During the meeting and in follow-up correspondence, all delegates agreed the need to communicate the outcomes of the meeting via a brief consensus statement. The two specific aims of this statement are to encourage researchers in sport and exercise science to 1. Where possible, adopt research methods that more effectively elucidate the role of the brain in mediating the effects of treatments and interventions. 2. Where possible, adopt methods that factor for and/or quantify placebo effects that could explain a percentage of inter-individual variability in response to treatments and intervention.

In humans, socio-environmental cues play an important role in determining adaptive psychophysiological states and behaviours. In sport and exercise, cues to cohesive groups and close, supportive relationships are ubiquitous, possibly because of their effects on neurobiological mechanisms underlying physical performance. Clinical research has shown that the presence of supportive others can lead to reductions in perceptions of pain, while research from sport and exercise science has shown that pain and physical fatigue occupy ranges on a single spectrum of physical discomfort, which works to regulate outputs during strenuous physical exertion. Given the similar neurobiological underpinnings of pain and fatigue, the involvement of both in the self-regulation of strenuous physical outputs, and the effects of social support on perceptions of pain and neurophysiological stress responses more generally, we hypothesised that perceptions of social support affect outputs during strenuous physical exercise by altering activity in self-regulatory mechanisms involved in perceptions of pain and fatigue. We used a between-subjects experimental design to test this hypothesis, varying participants’ social support and measuring physical outputs and perceptions of physical discomfort and exertion during a series of maximum-effort cycling bouts. Analyses showed that participants in the social support condition produced greater initial outputs and steeper declines over time, compared to controls. This effect was moderated by participant neuroticism; an important predictor of how individuals react to social support. We discuss these findings in terms of proposed causal mechanisms linking supportive, cohesive social environments with self-regulation and physical performance. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s40750-017-0086-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.