AUTHOR=Antoniewicz Franziska , Brand Ralf 

TITLE=Dropping Out or Keeping Up? Early-Dropouts, Late-Dropouts, and Maintainers Differ in Their Automatic Evaluations of Exercise Already before a 14-Week Exercise Course

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=7

YEAR=2016

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00838

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00838

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>The aim of this study was to examine how automatic evaluations of exercising (AEE) varied according to adherence to an exercise program. Eighty-eight participants (24.98 years ± 6.88; 51.1% female) completed a Brief-Implicit Association Task assessing their AEE, positive and negative associations to exercising at the beginning of a 3-month exercise program. Attendance data were collected for all participants and used in a cluster analysis of adherence patterns. Three different adherence patterns (52 maintainers, 16 early dropouts, 20 late dropouts; 40.91% overall dropouts) were detected using cluster analyses. Participants from these three clusters differed significantly with regard to their positive and negative associations to exercising before the first course meeting (<inline-formula><mml:math id="M2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msubsup><mml:mi mathvariant="normal" mathcolor="black">η</mml:mi><mml:mi mathvariant="normal" mathcolor="black">p</mml:mi><mml:mn mathvariant="normal" mathcolor="black">2</mml:mn></mml:msubsup></mml:math></inline-formula> = 0.07). Discriminant function analyses revealed that positive associations to exercising was a particularly good discriminating factor. This is the first study to provide evidence of the differential impact of positive and negative associations on exercise behavior over the medium term. The findings contribute to theoretical understanding of evaluative processes from a dual-process perspective and may provide a basis for targeted interventions.</p>