Structural relationships among exercise passion, emotion, and adherence behaviors of sports participants

My objective was to investigate the relationships among exercise passion, emotion, and exercise adherence behaviors of social-sports participants. I found that harmonious passion of sports participants increased positive emotions, but the effect of obsessive passion was not statistically significant. Harmonious passion decreased negative emotions, but stronger obsessive passion was associated with emotions that were more negative. Second, harmonious passion increased the participants’ exercise-adherence behaviors; however, obsessive passion had the exact opposite effect. Third, positive emotions increased exercise-adherence behaviors, but negative emotions decreased such behaviors. With respect to indirect effects, harmonious passion for exercise had significant emotion-mediated effects on exercise-adherence behaviors. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of passion for specific activities or behaviors that are performed by voluntary will, without any external constraints or restrictions.