The effect of motivational stimuli on exercise behavior

My Role

I was one of a researcher who planed the research study, designed screener, collect and analyzed data.

Timeline

I had approximately 8 weeks to complete the study. Below is the weekly plan of tasks that are expected to be completed.

Purpose of Study

I wanted to research the effects of motivational stimuli on exercise behavior because I had noticed that during the pandemic, as ourselves and others had been working or studying from home more frequently, it had felt more challenging to be active throughout the day. Therefore, the purpose of our study was to explore the effectiveness of new motivational stimuli, specifically video and audio, on people’s exercise behavior.

What is already known?

For this study, I conducted literature reviews and found that there are a good amount of studies that have shown that listening to music before and during exercise has a positive effect on motivation and exercise performance, and in certain instances viewing motivational videos during exercise or pre-exercise when coupled with music or motivational primes increases physical performance.

Research Question/Hypothesis

I was curious about what effect watching or listening to motivational content (other than music) before a workout has on someone’s motivation to exercise (rather than their physical performance during an exercise).

Based on literature reviews, I believed watching a video or listening to a speech featuring motivational content before exercise compared to a control condition would increase motivation, and that video would have a stronger effect than a speech due to the increased sensory input.

H1 - People who watch or listen to motivational content before a workout will show a significantly higher change in their motivation to exercise than those who do not watch or listen to motivational content before exercising.
H2 - People who watch motivational video content with audio before a workout will show a significantly higher change in their motivation to exercise than those who listen to audio-only motivational content.

Study Design

For our study I did a within subjects design. There were three sessions over the course of a week.  Two sessions consisted of an intervention pre-workout, one being the motivational video and one being the motivational speech, and there was one control session with no intervention.

Recruitment

Distributed a screener to my family member, friends, school Slack channel, and LinkedIn.

Recruited 15 participants who responded they exercise outside or inside

Some of the questions that I asked:

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Are you an athlete on a sports team?
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Do you workout alone or with others?
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What type of exercise do you typically do?

How motivated to workout are you on average/weekly average number of workouts?

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Why do you exercise?
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Measurement

Pre-study questionnaire contained participants normal workout routine, and the measurement scales focused on the Behavior Regulation in Exercise Questionnaire Version 2 (BREQ-2).

Core measurement (pre-intervention/post-intervention and pre-workout/post-workout) was measured via Likert scale questions based on the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) scale.

Data Analysis

Ran the linear mixed effect model in R after consolidating all survey responses.

Regression with Linear Mixed Effects Model that used for both interventions and the control group at once.

measured the difference between the participants’ pre and post-intervention motivation.

measured the difference between the participants’ pre and post-exercise motivation.

measured the overall motivational difference between the intervention conditions.

Result

For both conditions, the confidence intervals overlap zero indicating that compared to the control condition, when participants are shown motivational stimuli before a workout, there is most likely no significant difference in their motivation before and after that intervention.

For IV2 (audio stimulus), the beta coefficient and t-value suggest that there is potentially even a negative effect on motivation, but the sample size is too small to know for sure.

These values show that both conditions (IV1 and IV2) have high p-values (greater than 0.05), indicating that there is no statistically significant difference between the conditions compared to the baseline (control).