Search

Background: There is growing academic, civic and policy interest in the public health benefits of community-based exercise events. Shifting the emphasis from competitive sport to communal activity, these events have wide appeal, including among those new to sport or exercise. In addition to health benefits of physical activity, regular participation can reduce social isolation and loneliness through opportunities for social connection. Taking a broad evolutionary and social psychological perspective, we suggest that social factors warrant more attention in current approaches to physical (in)activity and exercise behaviour. We develop and test the hypothesis that social reward and support in exercise are associated with positive exercise experiences and greater performance outputs. Methods: Using a repeated-measures survey design, we examine the influence of social behaviour (e.g., attending with others, pre-event socialising) and perceptions of social support and belonging on subjective enjoyment, energy, fatigue, effort, and objective performance (run times) among a UK sample of parkrun participants.Results: Social factors were associated with greater subjective enjoyment and energy. Higher subjective energy, in turn, was associated with faster run times, without any corresponding increase in perceived effort. No significant main effects of social factors on fatigue, performance or effort were detected. Conclusions: The role of social structural factors has long been recognised in public health approaches to physical activity. Our results motivate greater research attention on how positive and rewarding social behaviours and experiences – particularly subjective enjoyment and energy, and perceptions of community social support and belonging - influence exercise-related behaviour, psychology and physiology, and promote health through collective physical activity. Approaching community exercise as a powerful context for social collaboration, reward and belonging also supplements the traditional focus on social facilitation and team sport that has dominated social psychological approaches within the sport and exercise sciences, and offers new avenues for understanding the deep connections among psychological, social and physical function in everyday health.

The placebo effect is traditionally viewed as a positive outcome resulting from a person's belief that an inert substance is in fact an active drug. In this context, it is often viewed as an intrapsychic phenomenon. However, most placebo effects reported in scientific research result from social interactions. These might be explicit, such as the description and administration of a treatment by a practitioner, or less explicit, for example, the recipient's perceptions of the practitioner's credibility, expertise, or confidence. On this basis, placebo effects are arguably social in origin. Many phenomena in sport are likewise social in origin, from the facilitation effects of a home field crowd or a cohesive team, to anxiety induced by an expert opponent or perceived underperformance. Such social effects have been the subject of research not only in social psychology, but also in experimental physiology. Emergent research in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology suggests that these social effects can be examined as a form of placebo effect. This suggestion is not a speculative position predicated on social and placebo effects sharing similar environmental cues and outcomes, but one based on a growing database indicating that drug, placebo, and social effects operate via common neurobiological mechanisms. In this paper, we examine the theoretical and empirical overlap between placebo and social effects and describe emergent research reporting specific brain pathways activated by socio-environmental cues as well as by drugs and placebos. We do so from three perspectives: the competitor, the teammate, the researcher.

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.

In two experimental studies, we investigated mechanisms hypothesized to underpin two pervasive and interrelated phenomena: that certain forms of group movement and exercise lead to social bonding and that social bonding can lead to enhanced exercise performance. In Study 1, we manipulated synchrony and exercise intensity among rowers and found that, compared with low intensity exercise, moderate intensity exercise led to significantly higher levels of cooperation in an economic game; no effect of synchrony vs. non-synchrony was found. In Study 2, we investigated the effects of bonding on performance, using synchrony as a cue of existing supportive social bonds among participants. An elite, highly bonded team of rugby players participated in solo, synchronized, and non-synchronized warm-up sessions; participants' anaerobic performance significantly improved after the brief synchronous warm-up relative to the non-synchronous warm-up. The findings substantiate claims concerning the reciprocal links between group exercise and social bonding, and may help to explain the ubiquity of collective physical activity across cultural domains as varied as play, ritual, sport, and dance.