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The passion-aggression relationship : testing mediational effects of moral disengagement and role-identity salience in competitive male ice hockey

University of British Columbia

The purpose of the present study was to test if harmonious and obsessive passion are predictors of aggressive behavior in competitive male ice hockey. It also examined whether moral disengagement and role-identity salience acted as mediators in the passion-aggression relationship. Based on the dualistic model of passion, harmonious passion is associated with more adaptive sport outcomes while obsessive passion is associated with more maladaptive sport outcomes (Vallerand, 2010). Since there is controversy about how to conceptualize aggression, the study measured reactive, instrumental, sanctioned and unsanctioned aggression. The participants were 77 competitive youth male ice hockey players (mean age = 16.54). The instrumental aggression scale had poor reliability and was dropped from analysis. Regression analysis found that obsessive passion was a predictor of reactive aggression (b = .385, p ≤ .001); harmonious passion was not a significant predictor (b = -.240, p = 070). These results supported previous work in sport. Mediation analysis using bootstrapping procedures (Hayes, 2013), however, did provide evidence that moral disengagement is not a mediator in the obsessive passion-reactive aggression relationship, or in the harmonious passion-reactive aggression relationship. Role-identity salience was not a significant mediator in the obsessive passion-reactive aggression relationship (95% BcCI [-.0340, .0931]), but did appear to mediate the harmonious passion-reactive aggression relationship (95% BcCI [.0020, .2019]). Sanctioned and unsanctioned aggression were exploratory variables, tested to assess their application in a sport context. Due to undesirable measurement properties, sanctioned aggression was only examined through Spearman’s rho correlations; these showed that sanctioned aggression was related to harmonious passion, moral disengagement, and role-identity salience. Unsanctioned aggression was not significantly related to either types of passion. Mediation analysis indicated that role-identity salience (95% BcCI [.0060, .1560]), but not moral disengagement (95% BcCI [-.1113, .0890]), mediated the harmonious passion-unsanctioned aggression relationship. There was no evidence of meditation effects for obsessive passion-unsanctioned aggression relationship. The findings regarding sanctioned and unsanctioned aggression support its application in a competitive sport context. Overall, passion-aggression relationships were inconsistent although there was evidence that role-identity salience may play a role in understanding aggression in sport.

Text

2015-04-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/52696

Kinesiology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/