Psychophysiological Measures of Emotional Sport Fan Identification

In today’s highly competitive sports business market, sports organizations have shifted their marketing strategy from a traditional exchange to a relationship paradigm. The relationship quality between sports fans and sport organizations contains many emotional constructs, and thus studies of emotion are increasingly relevant the sports marketing field. While most studies of emotional processing use self-report measures, the objectivity and validity of these metrics are limited by social expectations and demand effects. Psychophysiological measures of emotional processing offer significant potential benefits in the study of sports marketing relationships, including (1) quantitative data through direct measure; (2) The validation and clarification existing in self report data; and (3) tracking of emotional changes in real time. The utility of psychophysiological measures in the study of team sports identification and other relevant paradigms are outlined, and improvements in sports consumer research are discussed.