Background/Purpose
American College of Sports Medicine guidelines call for exercise facilities to have mirrors on at least two of four walls during group exercise classes in order to promote greater self-awareness and evaluation among patrons (ACSM, 1997). Earlier research has found, however, that mirrors produced negative effects on self-efficacy and feeling states of sedentary women who performed group exercise (Ginis, Jung, & Gauvin, 2003). Moreover, mirrored exercise environments seem to be more threatening to novice exercisers, especially women with social physic anxiety (Katula & McAuley, 2001). Heretofore, differences in motivation of exercisers have not been examined. The purpose of this research was to compare mirrored and non-mirrored exercise environments on the intrinsic motivation of exercisers in an aerobic dance class.
Method
Nineteen college students (15 women, 4 men), aged 21.4 + 1.9 years participated in two aerobic dance classes under different mirror conditions one week apart. Participants completed the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) after each class. Data were analyzed using a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA).
Analysis/Results
ANOVA yielded a significant main effect for mirrors on the perceived competence subscale of the IMI (p < .05). Examination of the means suggested that females showed higher levels of perceived competence than males when exercising with mirrors. No other IMI subscales showed significant main effects for gender or experience. A significant mirror by gender interaction was found on the interest-enjoyment subscale (p < .05) A plot of the means revealed that the interaction was caused by the fact that women were more interested in the exercise than men when mirrors were present.
Conclusions
These results show that mirrors have some effect on the intrinsic motivation levels of group exercisers and may be mediated by gender but not experience.
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