Author(s): HOSHINO, S., NARUSE, Y., HAMAURA, M., SHIBATA, M., KOMORI, Y., Institution: NARA WOMEN'S UNIVERSITY, Country: JAPAN, Abstract-ID: 2484

Introduction
Perceptions of exertion, affective responses, and physiological stress could make the exercise experience aversive, particularly for beginners. We reported that running alongside in young women lead to run faster and elicited positive emotions. In other words, a partner provided social facilitation and reduce the aversiveness of exercise experience (Hoshino et al., 2023). Furthermore, attentional cognitive strategy is important during long-distance running. Morgan & Pollock (1977) found that while amateur runners dissociate sensory input while running, elite athletes pay attention to emotions and bodily sensations. In this study we investigated how cognitive strategies (attentional association and dissociation) can change depending on whether women run with a partner, and how it affects their perception of exertion.
METHOD
Subjects: 14 female university and graduate students who don’t exercise often (20.9 ± 1.6 yr). Tasks and conditions: Flat treadmill self-paced running for 30 minutes under two conditions: Solo condition (SC) and Partner condition (PC). Subjects were instructed to “run as far as you can in 30 minutes. Measurements: (a) behavioral indices: total running distance, running speed, and rate of speed increase every 5 minutes (actual speed/initial speed), (b) physiological index: heart rate, and %HRmax, (c) psychological indices: Exercise Enjoyment Scale, RPE (Borg’s scale) on every 5 minutes (R5-R30), and 20 minutes after the end of running (A20), and the cognitive strategies (attentional association and dissociation) in three phases, each separated by 10 minutes: the early, the middle, and the late phase.
RESULTS & DISCUSSION
The total running distance in PC (4.12±0.536km) was significantly longer than in SC (3.96±0.54km) (t(13)=1.78, p<.05). The running
speed was significantly higher in the PC after 15 minutes running (R15-R25). As a result of two-way ANOVA for heart rate, a significant main effect was shown for time factor (F (1,13) =10.30, p<.01). In PC heart rate was higher than in SC. But there were no differences between groups in RPE. Concerned with the cognitive strategies, Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare conditions, PC had significantly lower associative strategy than SC in the early running phase (Z = -2.070, p = .038). This suggests that a partner reduces attention to the inside especially in the early phase. Furthermore, Friedman test was used between the differences of the three phases, only in the PC the dissociative strategy increased significantly from the middle to the last phases. These results indicated that the cognitive attention was directed outward, enabling faster running speeds perceived as “hard” around 170 bpm.
Conclusion
We found that during partnered running young women rated their perceived exertion lower and ran faster. This suggests that running partners effectively facilitate dissociative strategy and reduce the physical strain associated with high intensity running.