Abstract

Physical education can play a significant role in the education of emotional skills which directly affect the academic performance of students and improve their subjective wellbeing. This paper examines the emotional experience of adolescents in different kinds of sports games with and without competition. It involves a quasi-experimental repeated measures design. 220 students doing lower and upper secondary education at 5 schools in Catalonia and Valencia took part in it. 4 sessions based on different sets of sports games were held. Using the validated Games and Emotions Scale (GES) the students identified the emotional experience arising in each game. The data analysis was performed using generalised estimating equations (GEE). The model considered within-participants factors, which were 1) motor action domain, 2) competition and 3) type of emotion, and between-participants factors, which were 1) gender and 2) sports background. The results led to three main findings: a) the prominent role of sociomotor games in promoting strong positive emotions; b) the presence of adversaries (in competition and cooperation-competition games) increases the intensity of negative emotions; c) the introduction of competition increases the intensity of positive emotions in psychomotor games and the values of negative emotions in sociomotor games. This study provides a scientific rationale and practical recommendations to promote emotional physical education geared towards subjective wellbeing and the acquisition of healthy lifestyles by adolescents.