Television sports and athlete sex: looking at the differences in watching male and female athletes.

Hypothesis 3 stated that male study participants would give more cognitive effort, as indexed through heart rate, to sports featuring male athletes while Hypothesis 4 predicted that female study participants would give more cognitive effort to sports featuring female athletes. Statistical analyses show that there is a significant interaction of athlete sex on heart rate for male participants only, F(6, 138) = 2.75, p = .02, [[epsilon].sup.2]] = .06, and not for female participants, F(6, 132) = 1.64, p = .14. An examination of the graph of heart rate scores for male participants shows that the heart rate data partially supports this hypothesis. The graph shows that through the first half of the message, sports featuring male athletes and sports featuring female athletes appear to elicit the same level of cognitive effort (lines are parallel). At approximately the halfway point, a deceleration occurs while viewing sports featuring male athletes. See Figure 1. The polynomial trend contrasts performed on this data suggest that the pattern of deceleration of heart rate changes is significant between the two conditions, F(1,23) = 10.34, p = .004, [[epsilon].sup.2] = .28.

For Hypotheses 5 and 6 predictions were made about which content would be encoded better for male and female participants, as indexed through mean recognition scores. Hypothesis 5 predicted that male study participants would better encode sports featuring male athletes, while Hypothesis 6 predicted that female study participants would better encode female sports, as indexed through recognition scores. For Hypothesis 5, though the difference in the mean scores was significant, F(1, 23) = 9.42, p = .005, [[epsilon].sup.2] = .26, mean recognition scores show that male participants received better recognition scores for sports featuring female athletes (M = .51, SD = .10) than for sports featuring male athletes (M = .45, SD = .14). This held true for female participants in Hypothesis 6; female participants did significantly encode and recognize female sports (M = .48, SD = .09) better than male sports (M = .36, SD = .08), F(1, 22) = 24.55, p < .001, [[epsilon].sup.2] = .50.

Discussion

The primary purpose of this study was to examine how male viewers and female viewers differ in their physiological and cognitive processing of sports messages that feature either male athletes or female athletes. What came out of this experiment were some very interesting results. Though sports with male athletes elicited higher self-reported levels of arousal, physiological arousal did not tell the same story; heart rate decreased for all participants while viewing sports featuring female athletes, indicating more attentional resources were given to these messages and higher scores on the recognition questions from the sports with female athletes were achieved by all participants.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Sports that feature male athletes are the typical television fare. It is easy to see why when examined under the lens of social dominance orientation. Social dominance orientation, as reviewed earlier, is a personality variable that provides for an individual to have a personal preference for a social group to which they belong to be perceived as superior to other social groups (Pratto et al., 1994; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999); it also allows for groups that can be considered socially weak to have a difficult time in attempting to overcome these perceived societal hierarchical structures. Televised sports demonstrate and strengthen the societal division between men and women through their portrayals of male athletes and female athletes. Male athletes are shown as strong, disciplined, and competitive while female athletes are portrayed as emotional, graceful, and passive (Koivula, 2001; Laberge & Albert, 1999). Social dominance orientation seems to come through as a possible reason for response biases in the data for self-reported arousal.

It is also easy to see why television sports is dominated by male athletes given the self-report results reported here and the industry reliance on self-report data of viewer preferences. In reviewing the results for self-reported arousal, both male and female participants self-reported feeling more aroused while watching sports that featured male athletes; in fact, athlete sex had a significant effect on self-reported arousal scores for both segments of the participant population. What is interesting to note is that, even though self-reported arousal and skin conductance readings should somewhat correlate (Greenwald et al., 1989), in this study they did not. Though sports with male athletes garnered a significantly higher level of self-reported arousal than sports with female athletes, skin conductance responses showed that there were no significant differences in physiological arousal responses to the viewing of sports featuring male or female athletes. This finding may lend credence to the idea of a response bias; individuals have been taught to believe that sports with male athletes are inherently more exciting and arousing, therefore leading to higher self-report scores on their emotional arousal, while their physiological readings belie that possibility by demonstrating that the human body is similarly aroused by sports featuring male or female athletes.

The principles of social dominance orientation allow for such response biases to occur; male study participants report higher levels of arousal-while watching sports featuring male athletes than sports featuring female athletes in order to maintain their perceived social dominance over women. With male athletes constantly being portrayed as a superior group to female athletes, it is not surprising that male participants would report feeling more aroused while watching male athletes. The conceptualization of social dominance orientation asserts that members of a group perceived as superior would work toward continuing their superiority. In this study, male participants appear to agree with the accepted hierarchy and enjoy sports featuring male athletes because of their inherent membership in the "superior" group. At the same time, the self-reported arousal ratings by female participants for sports with female athletes were larger than that of male participants, though, which suggests that these women were attempting to break away from the accepted belief that male athletes are superior to female athletes. Social dominance orientation allows for members of the out-group to attempt to better their social standing (Sidanius, 1993; Wilson & Liu, 2003); though speculative, these results suggest that this is what is being attempted by the female viewers.

Research indicates that women do not adhere to the concepts behind social dominance orientation as stringently as men (Pratto, Stallworth, Sidanius, & Siers, 1997; Sidanius et al., 1994); in some cases men believe more in maintaining the hierarchical structure of society than women believe in the need for changing it. In the case of the current study, these women may subscribe to some of the same stereotypical societal ideas behind masculinity and femininity, which in turns lends itself to these perceptions of men's and women's participation in sports. These beliefs about acceptable roles in certain facets of society could feasibly explain the overall higher arousal ratings by female participants for sports with male athletes than for sports with female athletes.

A possible explanation for these differences in emotional and cognitive responses to sports that feature male and female athletes is the possible novelty effect of viewing female athletes. Sports with female athletes, as compared to sports with male athletes, are broadcast on television rather infrequently. Both male and female participants had a significant decrease in heart rate while watching sports with female athletes, more so than during male sports clips. Sports featuring female athletes were also recognized better by both male and female participants than sports featuring male athletes. Due to this ability to better recognize the content of the footage featuring female athletes, it is reasonable to conclude that an increased amount of resources were allocated toward the encoding of the message's content (A. Lang, 2000).