Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

A Study on the Effect of Experience in Sports on Developing Courage (#782)

Shunta Shimotori 1 , Jun-ichi Nishida 2
  1. Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
  2. Faculty of Business Administration, Kindai University, Higashi-Osaka, Osaka, Japan

Various studies have reported the correlation between strength and well-being, resilience, depression, while little number of research have focused on experience in sports.  Among strength, courage should be developed through sports because it is necessary to make a decision and execute one’s acts.  This study investigated the correlation between experience in sports and courage.  540 Japanese University were assessed their courage with Courage Measure (Norton & Weiss, 2009) which was translated into Japanese by the researcher.  In addition, participants completed a questionnaire to collect their demographic information regarding their experience in sports, years of experience, levels, and sports events.  The results indicated that courage scores of participants with sports experience were significant higher than those of non-experienced.  Furthermore, those who had sports experience over 13 years scored significant higher than those with sports experience less than 6 years. Similarly, those experience in world championships gained higher scores than those with experience in regional competitions.  In contrast, individual sports events did not affect courage scores. These finds provide the possibility that experience in sports, and years of sports experience develops courage.  Future studies should explore the effect of the number of sports events on developing courage  specify experience in sports.