A Survey of the Conceptual Structure of Aesthetic Response to Sports

Sports are worldwide phenomena laden with aesthetics. To date, however, little is known about the conceptual structure underlying the aesthetic processing of sports. To address this issue, we used an online survey to investigate the terms that are actively used to describe the aesthetics of sport and to construct the concept content of aesthetics of sport based on these terms. The roles of sports categories, gender, and expertise were also considered. In a time-restricted association task, more than 2,000 undergraduates listed words that they thought were suitable to describe the aesthetics of sport. The results showed a variety of frequent terms, in which healthy played a central role. These words were clustered into two groups: body- or sportsmanship-related and emotion-related words. Individual differences and sports categories marginally affected the concept mapping. These findings reveal a special and stable conceptual structure for the aesthetics of sport and highlight the role of the beneficial effects of sports on character, mental health, and the body.