Feeling the extreme : an exploratory study of experienced emotions during extreme sport

Abstract

In the current study 13 BASE-jumpers and 18 skydivers reported their emotions immediately after a jump and after a 24 hours delay, using verbal (Likert-like scales) and visual (Feelometer) emotional report. Heart rate measures were also collected during, and 24 hours after the jump. The Feelometer is a newly developed tool enabling the participants to give a moment-to-moment report from a particular event or episode. Given the complexity and dynamics of extreme sport experiences, the Feelometer is a promising supplement to verbal reports when it comes to measuring emotional feelings. Compared with everyday episodes, the results from the current study suggest that extreme sport episodes produce more heterogenous feeling states with a clear distinction between otherwise relatively similar feelings. The Feelometer further revealed that during the jump, participants experienced huge variation in pleasure, but relatively stable levels of interest. The variation reported for pleasure suggests that it is hard to summarize an extreme sport event on a verbal rating scale, intented to cover the entire episode. This result may explain why the study did not find any significant correlations between verbally and visually reported immediate pleasure. However, in retrospect the verbal and visualized reported emotions correlated significantly.