The effects of social support on self-regulation in physical exercise

Cross-culturally, humans come together to move together, with physical exertion in the form of sport and exercise often being a social endeavour. Findings from disparate fields of research suggest that social environments can play an important role in moderating self- regulatory processes, such as pain and fatigue, that govern outputs and experiences during physical exertion. This, along with ethnographic and observational research linking supportive social environments with improved outcomes in sport and exercise, suggests that social support during strenuous physical exertion may facilitate physical outputs. However, the link between social support, outputs, and experiences during strenuous physical exercise is yet to be tested empirically. This thesis aims to do this, using a variety of methods to test the hypothesis that the presence of supportive, cohesive social environments change activity in neurobiological mechanisms involved in the self-regulation of strenuous physical exercise, leading to reductions in pain and fatigue and/or increases in physical outputs. The theoretical and empirical underpinnings of this hypothesis are established in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, which link proximate and ultimate explanations of self-regulatory processes to social environments, focusing on the extent to which social support, cohesion, and integration influence human experiences and outcomes in everyday life, and in sport and exercise more specifically. Chapter 3 reports the results of an experimental manipulation of social support in everyday exercisers. Results showed that socially supported exercisers produced greater initial physical outputs, with steeper declines in these outputs over time, and that these effects were moderated by a personality trait related to how individuals appraise support from others. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 use both ‘big data’ and survey methods to investigate the effects of the presence of close social relationships, perceptions of social support, and social integration at a community-based 5 km run. Results suggest that runners produce faster 5 km runs when in the presence of close, supportive others, and that these effects may be mediated by enhanced feelings of energy. Chapter 6 reports the results of an fMRI-compatible experiment that compared the effects of a cue to social support and a placebo treatment on exercise performance. Results showed significant, performance-enhancing social support effects on physical outputs, and that these effects were strongest in exercise trials with more difficult output targets. In Chapter 7, these results are summarised as a whole, and discussed with a focus on their limitations as well as their implications for current research. Covering research ranging from psychological investigations of social support, to clinical studies of endogenous analgesia, to literature on the neurobiological underpinnings of the self-regulation of physical outputs, this thesis integrates diverse bodies of work in providing a novel theoretical and empirical account of how and why social environments affect outputs and experiences during strenuous physical exertion.

Keywords: Placebo
Fatigue
Social support
Pain
Human evolution
Exercise
Physical exercise
Self-regulation
Advisor: Cohen, E