HEDONIC PURSUITS, PHYSICAL ACTIVITY FOR PLEASURE: IDENTIFYING AFFECT AND MOTIVATIONAL HEALTH BEHAVIOR CHANGE FACTORS WITH PHYSICAL ACTIVITY SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT

Physical activity offers a range of health benefits but can be difficult to initiate and maintain. Self-regulatory processes are one route to understanding health behavior change. While affective mechanisms like positive affect and reward processing provide a valuable neurobiological pathway to elucidate individual motivations for physical activity. Theories and models that emphasize the role of affect and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are applied in the current study to deepen our understanding of physical activity behaviors. Psychosocial sources of individual motivations, such as improving mood or changing one’s physical appearance, can provide insight into ways to alter affective-cognitive mechanisms to encourage sustainable physical activity behaviors. The present study applied a mixed-method approach to elucidate themes of affect and motivation in social media content. A sample of 2,585 Twitter posts were collected in mid-July 2022. A motivational and health behavior change qualitative codebook was first developed to guide thematic coding analyses. Thematic coding results revealed a high frequency of extrinsic motivation and goal and change-oriented facilitators of physical activity. Intrinsic motivation included the highest percentage of positive attitudes compared to other motivation types. Health-oriented themes, satisfaction, dissatisfaction with physical appearance, and weight loss were also relevant. LIWC-22 analyses supported the role of positive affect and informed health themes. BERT topic modeling analyses provided overarching physical activity topic themes for motivation and physical activity. Interpretations of the current results were presented, and future directions were suggested.