Attentional Bias In Undergraduates Of Different Exerciser Self-Schemata

The physical and psychological benefits of exercise have been well proven by a large amount of researches and investigations. However, public participation of exercising still remains unsatisfactory even after large-scaled exercise participation promotion in China and numerous health campaigns and advertisements in developed countries. From the perspective of self-schemata processing, the reason why exercise promotion projects turn ineffective may lie in the attentional bias of different exerciser self-schematics towards exercise-related information. Based on the background above, this study classified different exerciser self-schematics among undergraduates with Kendziski's Exercise Self-Schema Questionnaire and conducted two experiments.The first experiment explored the attentional bias in different exercise self-schematic undergraduates. Emotional Stroop task was employed to examine the attentional bias of explicit exerciser self-schematic and non-schematic undergraduates towards exercise-related and sedentary lifestyle-related words. The results partially supported the Self-schema Processing Theory of attentional bias with the fact that explicit exerciser self-schematic undergraduates did show attentional bias towards exercise-related words.The second experiment explored implicit exercise self-schemata. Implicit Association Test was utilized to examine the relationship between explicit and implicit exerciser self-schemata, and the implicit exerciser self-schemata of different explicit exerciser self-schematics. The result suggested that explicit and implicit exerciser self-schemata are distinct yet related structure; both explicit and implicit exerciser self-schemata showed significant preference to exercise, holding positive implicit exerciser self-schemata.This study further verified the attentional bias of different explicit exerciser self-schematic undergraduates and to some extent supported the Self-schema Processing Theory of attentional bias. Together with the exploration of the relationship between explicit and implicit exerciser self-schemata, this study could help enrich domestic researches in this area.