Yannick Adams ¹ Maximilian Augenstein ¹ Philip Furley ¹ Anna Krieg ¹ Philipp Born ¹ Ingo Helmich ^2*

• ¹ German Sport University Cologne, Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
• ² Smith College, Northampton, United States

Introduction: Appraisal emotion approaches as well as self-regulation theory emphasize that appraising an event as conducive or detrimental for one's current goals may trigger an affective response that can be observed nonverbally. Because there may exist a female advantage in the inhibition and self-regulation of emotions, we hypothesized that female but not male athletes regulate emotions during sports by explicit nonverbal behaviors. Methods: The entire nonverbal hand movement behavior of right-handed female and male tennis athletes was recorded during competitive matches. All immediate nonverbal expressions after point losses and wins were coded by two independent blind raters applying the NEUROpsychological GESture (NEUROGES®) system. Results: No gender differences were found for the overall hand movement activity. Female athletes executed more fall gestures than males as well as in space and both handed act as a unit hand movements. In contrast to males, females also spent significantly more time with both-handed pantomime gestures (e.g., performing an imaginary backhand), particularly when losing points. Regardless of gender, emotion/attitude gestures (fall and palm-out gestures) were found to be significantly increased after losing points whereas emblem/social convention gestures and subjectoriented actions were increased after winning. Discussion: Increased expressions of pantomime gestures in female athletes after losing indicate that women regulate negative emotions nonverbally by explicit hand movements. Thus, female athletes seem to nonverbally cope with their negative emotional arousal by explicit nonverbal behaviors in order to control performance.