Abstract

Physical activity (PA) is considered essential to overall health, yet it is consistently reported that children worldwide are failing to meet the recommended levels. Affective responses are a potential predictor of long-term PA engagement due to their bidirectional relationship with PA. One way to influence the affective response to PA may be to influence the environment in which it takes place; a method of doing this is to immerse children using a narrative with characters. The aim of this research was to compare the effects of using a Disney branded, compared to a non-branded, PA session on children’s post activity affective responses and perceived effort of PA. 32 children participated (aged between 4-11 years) and they each completed four sessions of branded activities, and four sessions of unbranded activities. The results showed that children had similar positive affective responses and perceived effort to branded and unbranded activities, and qualitative feedback from parents supported this. However, a secondary finding from qualitative thematic analysis was that parents considered branding a key contributing factor to children’s enjoyment and the effort they put into the PA sessions. Future research into influencing the affective response through the environment should carefully consider how to capture this during the activity. Lastly, the research was conducted during the period of the COVID-19 lockdown and so should be interpreted in this context. Conceptual replication outside of this should be an aim of future research.

Introduction

Early development of healthy behaviours, including physical activity (PA), may play a prophylactic role in health outcomes (Lipowska and Lipowski 2018). PA is an essential part of a child’s overall health and wellbeing (Janssen and LeBlanc 2010), and the World Health Organisation currently recommend children engage in at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous PA daily; however, there are consistent reports that children worldwide fail to meet these guidelines (Sallis et al., 2016; Ridgers et al., 2014). As a result, many public health organisations consider promoting PA in children a high priority (Lavizzo-Mourey et al., 2012).

Tackling this issue requires understanding of the psychosocial factors that impact these behaviours (Amin et al., 2018). There is currently a theoretical transition away from social cognitive models for determining PA, towards the affective response as a predictor of engagement (Ekkekakis 2017). Despite health behaviour theories not including consideration of affect (Barnett et al., 2019) many have argued that it should play a more prominent role. Conner and Armitage (2006) write how the Theory of Planned Behaviour could be expanded to include other variables, including affect. The theory was developed to provide explanations of both formal and informal motivational influences over behaviour and thus including affect could further this understanding (Conner and Armitage 2006). The bidirectional relationship between affective states and PA in children emphasises the importance of promoting positive emotional responses during PA to influence subsequent participation (Dunton et al., 2014).

This is supported by hedonic theory: that people are more inclined and motivated to engage in activities that bring them pleasure, and how the response to the behaviour becomes a determinant for future behaviour (Williams, 2008). Further, operant conditioning posits that desirable or undesirable outcomes from a behaviour effects its continuance due to the learnt associations (Rhodes and Kates 2015). PA itself is deeply affective and emotional, so it is critical to understand the significance of these aspects to gain a full appreciation of PA (Piggin 2020). Humans tend to maximise pleasure and minimise displeasure, suggesting that to ensure continued engagement in a behaviour then that behaviour needs to have pleasurable experiences attached to it (Williams 2008). Indeed, in children positive affective responses before, during, and after PA have been shown to be predictive of subsequent PA engagement (Dunton et al., 2014). In short if children have positive experiences of PA this is expected to positively influence future engagement.

One approach that has previously been used to influence children’s PA levels is social marketing i.e. “the use of marketing principles and techniques to influence a target audience to voluntarily accept, reject, modify or abandon a behaviour for the benefit of individuals, groups, or society as a whole” (Kotler et al., 2002). Social marketing is well placed to create change through its use of commercial marketing strategies to sell healthy behaviours (Kotler et al., 2002) using the 4 P approach: product, price, promotion, and place. Of particular interest to engaging children in PA is the way that it is promoted, and thus the use of advertising, public relations, media advocacy and entertainment vehicles (Weinreich 2006). Often to promote a healthy behaviour to children, characters are used; indeed, reviews have identified this as an effective strategy to both promote PA and healthy nutrition (Budzynski-Seymour et al., 2019). Research has found that characters attract children’s attention, improve product recognition, and create positive brand attitudes (Letona et al., 2014). Advertisers use pictures and simply drawn animations of funny, brightly coloured characters on the front of their products to entice children (de Droog et al., 2014). Children also develop special relationships with these characters known as a parasocial interaction. After exposure to the character children tend to see them as a friend and want to be part of that character’s social world (Hoffner 1996; Lemish 2007). Although the research into using characters specifically in a PA setting is currently sparse, the potential benefits of using characters to promote PA does seem promising.

The use of characters is often paired with a related story and narrative. Storytelling and entertainment approaches have commonly been used to communicate heath information previously by researchers and practitioners (Shen and Han 2014). This type of communication is commonly dubbed entertainment education, and its goal is to positively influence awareness, knowledge, attitudes and/or behaviours through using characters and narratives to immersive the audience member in the story (Moyer-Gusé 2008). The concept behind this is that entertainment education works by maintaining the viewers’ attention through appealing stories whereby the viewer can identify with the characters involved and engage in the story line, meanwhile the message can be delivered and processed.

One strategy that seems to combine both social marketing and entertainment education is Public Health England’s Change4Life 10-minute Disney shake ups. Public Health England developed a strategy using social marketing to steer individuals towards making healthier lifestyle choices (Muldeerrig 2017). In their resources aimed at children, Change4Life have partnered with Disney for their “10 minutes shake ups”. These are games for children to play that are 10 minutes long and intended to help them towards meeting their daily target of 60 minutes moderate to vigorous PA (UK Chief Medical Officers Guidelines 2019). These resources are aimed at children between the ages of 5-11 years old and include a variety of PA based games designed alongside a range of characters that may appeal to both boys and girls¹.

Using brands such as Disney to help influence behaviour is not a new approach; research highlights Disney films often include messages expressed in a captivating way, and the films, characters, and narratives can help to shape the values, attitudes, behaviours, and encourage new ways of thinking about issues (Tranter and Sharpe 2012). Furthermore, previous Chairman and Chief Executive of the Walt Disney company, Bob Iger, pledged the company’s commitment to using the unique relationship that children have with Disney characters in a positive way to help families lead healthier lives (Public Health England 2014). There is also a potential concern that use of specific characters such as Disney may merely foster continued behaviours towards their use as opposed to PA behaviour. However there has been research supporting their use in promoting prosocial behaviour in children. de Leuww and van der Laan (2018) studied children’s responses after being exposed to a clip from a Disney film with or without prosocial behaviour. Those children who watched the clip containing the prosocial behaviour were more likely to help their friends with the subsequent puzzle task. It is suggested that perhaps, similarly to the influence over prosocial behaviour, using Disney characters in a PA setting may also promote the PA engagement of children. This is supported by preliminary research from Public Health England, who reported that 64% of children surveyed said they would be more physically active if they saw their favourite Disney characters being active (Public Health England 2019). Considering the role of affect in PA behaviour it may be that use of such characters and narratives to create an immersive experience enhances the positive affective experience of PA. Therefore, the aim of this research was to compare the effects of using a Disney branded, compared to a non-branded PA session, on children’s post activity affective responses and perceived effort of PA.

Methods

Results

Discussion

Despite the support for the resources when examining the qualitative data, there was no clear effects of the Disney branding for the 10-minute shake ups resources specifically when considering children’s post activity valence, arousal, and perceived effort responses. In fact, both sessions appeared to produce largely equivalent, and positive effects. We anticipated that the Disney branded sessions would result in a more positive affective experience based on the impact that characters can have on children (Rydell et al., 2006; Letona et al., 2014; de Droog et al., 2014; Hoffner 1996 and Lemish 2007). However, a limitation to our study, because of it being conducted in ecologically valid environment, was the difficulty in capturing measures during activities without causing disruption to the intended immersion. Despite this, given the population examined (i.e. children/adolescents), we have some confidence that our design would have been capable of detecting between condition differences through post-activity sampling of affect.

Prior research has shown that there might be a “rebound” effect whereby, even when affective responses differ during activity, post activity responses can return to baseline levels potentially masking any differences between conditions. Thus, the children in this sample may have differed in their affect between conditions during the activities, yet the ratings provided immediately post may not have reflected this. However, prior research in adolescents typically shows that it takes some time for affective rebounding to fully occur (>5 minutes) and that even immediately post exercise there are still differences evident, at least when comparing differing intensities of effort for activities (Sheppard and Parfitt 2008). This seems to be the case even when comparing between groups with different habitual PA levels (Hallgren et al., 2010) and our analysis did not reveal any clear effects of PA levels prior to when lockdown was imposed either; though notably our sample was primarily children who were fairly active already. Thus, our results which reflect affective responses immediately post activity may still suggest that there was no difference during activities between conditions. Indeed, Kwan and Byran (2010) reported that post-task affect (taken 15 minutes post activity) moderated the intention-behaviour relationship as greater positive affect post exercise were associated with stronger intention-behaviour relationships. It is however worth noting that previous research PA shows the relationship may be moderated by the intensity of effort of the initial activity (Schneider et al., 2009).

When considering the results of the affect in circumplex space, children appeared to be “excited” during both conditions, previous research would suggest such responses refer to people being “excited” or “elated” (Posner et al., 2005; though as noted we did not capture such data in our sample explicitly), which was seen after both conditions (though notably there was considerable inter- and intra-individual variation, the majority showed typically positive responses), which shows that despite the conditions children experience positive affective responses towards PA. This is similar to prior results comparing traditional physical activities (extracurricular sport) with novel fun activities (trampoline park sessions); children showed similar post activity affective responses (and similar to those reported here) for both activities (Budzynski-Seymour et al., 2019). While it is not clear whether the lack of between condition differences in affect is a result of our study design and post activity measurement, or whether it truly reflects that children responded similarly while performing activities irrespective of branding, the qualitative feedback from parents suggests some preference for the branded activities.

The qualitative data received from a sample of parents seemed to support the quantitative data of generally positive affective responses, yet also contrasted the comparison between conditions with preferences towards branded sessions being reported. It is worth noting that the sample of parents who provided feedback represents only 43.75% of the overall sample, therefore caution needs to be taken when conclusions are made. The most common theme identified was the overall enjoyment of the activities (this included both the branded and unbranded sessions). Given the lack of differences in affective response, this may merely suggest that, given sufficiently fun and engaging activities, additional branding and narrative has little impact. However, the second most common theme was the specific benefits of using Disney; there were 7 comments made here which support the use of the Disney branding over the unbranded sessions. One specific parental comment from this theme was a comment that the “branded ones were more enjoyable, she tried harder on those days”. The Disney branded sessions had the additions of a narrative and characters, and when these were present the parents perceived their children tried harder and enjoyed the sessions more. This might reflect the perceived effort where there was a small effect in favour of the branded sessions; though as noted this was small, non-significant with our adjusted alpha, and the estimate was insufficiently precise to infer equivalence.

Another parent commented “I didn’t think she realised she was exercising”. This comment is of particular interest as it demonstrates well the research around entertainment education. Entertainment education is a popular strategy for incorporating health and educational messages into popular media with the goal of positively influencing awareness, knowledge, attitudes, and/or behaviours (Moyer-Gusé 2008). Two main areas of interest around this are the use of a narrative and characters. Narrative involvement involves the viewer being engaged in the story line rather than in their immediate environment and as such they experience the vicarious, cognitive and emotional responses to the narrative as it develops (Moyer-Gusé 2008). Secondly with the use of characters, similarly the viewer forgets about their own reality and temporarily becomes the characters taking on their perspective (Cohen 2001). Many entertainment education approaches employ a narrative structure whereby they lead a child through a story resulting in the child feeling swept up and developing an interest in following the events (Moyer-Gusé 2008). Children take on the role of the characters in the story as the child is engrossed in the narrative; forgetting the reality surrounding them, they take on the perspective of the character (Cohen 2001). Parents in this study reported that when they completed the Disney branded Change4Life sessions they found the addition of the characters useful and that the children “enjoyed having specific roles to play”. This perhaps evidences the theory in practice; the Change4Life 10-minutes shake ups using Disney branding provide a level of immersion, gave the children participating a role to play, and both of these elements were at least perceived by parents to have helped to increase the engagement and enjoyment.

As stated earlier, an important component of the research focused around immersing the children in their environment, based upon the entertainment education literature. The influence of the environment is however an important point to raise; much of the previous research on affect and PA has been conducted in highly controlled and typically “non-immersive” environments (e.g. Sheppard and Parfitt 2008; Ekkekakis et al., 2006; Parfitt and Markland 2000); hence the ability to sample affect during the activity. This study has highlighted the issues that arise when affect needs to be measured during activity in a “real-world” setting. Indeed, the contrast between quantitative and qualitative results as they relate to the between condition comparisons might suggest that in such settings affect may be less influential than the more cognitive appraisal (though notably those of the parents in this case) of activities engaged in. However, one study which has been successful in capturing affect during ecologically valid activity is that of Dunton et al. (2014). Ecological momentary assessment was used and does support the bidirectional relationships of affect and engagement in moderate to vigorous PA. However, a limitation to their study also was the inability to know exactly what kinds of activities were engaged in and the environment in which they were performed. Specific to the present study, collecting affect was considered an issue during the activity where the environment was intended to induce a degree of immersion. This is a “catch-22” of sorts for this area of research. There is a need for more ecologically valid testing of theories relating to the relationships between PA and affect. Yet in doing such research it is difficult to avoid breaking the ecologically valid conditions under which measurement needs to take place. More research and exploratory studies need to be conducted to determine the best way to accurately assess affect in a way whereby the immersion in the activity is not greatly impacted.

The ecologically valid setting of this study, whilst presenting limitations in design, could however be considered a strength which reflects that it might be difficult to replicate findings relating to PA an affect identified in controlled laboratory settings in noisy real-world environments. Indeed, such noise is evident when considering the between and within participant variation³. However, another contextual consideration for this study pertaining to the ecological validity is that it was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. The final theme from the qualitative data, which reflected this, is also worth discussing given the context in which the research was conducted and the inherent caveats this creates to interpretation. This research was conducted at a time where children were experiencing a worldwide health pandemic, and there was some evidence in the parental comments that this may have impacted their emotional state. One parent commented that their children’s “mental health has been up and down” during lockdown and that “some days they did not want to do the activities at all”. As noted, there was considerable variation in valence, arousal, and perceived effort both between and within children. Such day-to-day variation in children’s mental health and wellbeing likely influenced this and potentially masked any small positive effects of the branding on these measures. Although, for valence in particular, responses were typically positive reiterating that children generally appear to have positive affective experiences doing the activities in either condition and, as noted, this was supported by qualitative comments. This is a really important point to emphasise in the situation under which this study was conducted; the lockdown imposed life changing circumstances for everyone, including children. The effects have been far reaching, and include mental health impacts. The relationship between mental health and PA is well established (Ahn and Fedewa 2011) and therefore a reduction in PA levels is expected to have had a negative effect on mental health; notwithstanding the additional worry and anxiety that comes with experiencing a worldwide health pandemic. The usual approaches to engaging in PA that might help in coping with these life changing circumstances have been compromised as a result of lockdown.

Limitation and future research

One limitation of the study is that, due to the nature of data collection, the actual intensity of effort of activities was unknown. While not significant, it seems that the perceived effort could be slightly higher for the branded sessions, but the affective scores were lower. It is well established by previous research that as the intensity of the PA increases this results in a decline in affect⁴ (e.g. Ekkekakis and Petruzzello 1999); indeed in children, though positive affect generally seems to decrease during exercise this is more extreme with higher intensities and differences are present even post activity (Sheppard and Parfitt, 2008). Though, the perception of effort may not accurately reflect the actual effort required during activity (Steele, 2020), and indeed the perception of effort and affect are phenomenologically separate constructs also (Hardy and Rejeski, 1989). Future work should examine the impact of character branding and narrative upon the spontaneous actual effort of activity that children experience, and the role that this might play in affective responses. It was also noted that, while not significant, exploratory analysis did tend to demonstrate a small negative relationship between PA levels and perception of effort.

A further limitation is that our sample was heavily weighted towards those who were already active. Were those who were less active included we may have seen greater between person variability in outcomes across conditions, as well as stronger relationships with PA levels. We also did not capture data on other socio-demographic characteristics (e.g. race/ethnicity, socio-economic status) and so it is unclear of the generalisability or applicability of these findings (for example, not everyone may have access to the online resources). Our conditions were for most participants performed in group settings (i.e. with siblings), and hence the use of a hierarchical model; but this limits generalisability to other settings. The limited responses for the qualitative feedback from parents also meant that it was difficulty to ascertain whether saturation of the themes chosen had occurred.

Findings are also limited to activities including Disney characters. Whether findings here can be inferred as generalisable to other branded narrative driven activities is not certain. However, in other work we have attempted to identify the types of characteristics children’s favourite Disney characters exhibit such that other characters exhibiting these might also be considered (Budzynski-Seymour et al., 2020). Future research should of course examine the effects of characters and narrative across different experimental conditions to discern any generalisable effects. Additionally, though our sample size was more than adequate to power the study to detect previously “observed” effect sizes, we fell short of that required for the more “conservative” effects. However, given the differences in raw units observed here it seems unlikely that such conservative effects are very meaningful even if with larger samples they would be detectable.

Omitting measures during activity can result in any potential changes occurring during the activity to be missed (Bixby et al., 2001). This more restricted sampling strategy may result in a failure to capture the dynamic changes that occur during the activity which reveal a truer reflection of actual activity affect. The reasoning behind adopting a pre and/or post activity sampling strategy may be attributed to the fact that to take a measure during the activity, the activity must be interrupted and disturbed (potentially altering the phenomenological experience itself; Ariely, 1998), and thus for ease pre- and post-scores are more common. A key consideration that was made which is specific to this research is that there is a strong emphasis on the idea of immersing children in an environment, by using elements of entertainment education – characters and a narrative. For this reason, post affect scores were chosen but the limitations that arise from not sampling during the activity are noted. However, we felt justified in using this approach with children given that, though often the affective “rebound” phenomena can mask between condition differences when capturing affect post activity in adults, various studies suggest that this is less of a concern in children were post activity affect may still offer useful information regarding the activities and subsequent behaviour (Sheppard and Parfitt, 2008; Hallgren et al., 2010; Dunton et al., 2014; Budzynski-Seymour et al., 2019). This more restricted sampling strategy may result in a failure to capture the dynamic changes that occur during the activity which reveal a truer reflection of actual activity affect. This may be considered a limitation of the study, however a key consideration that was made which is specific to this research is that there is a strong emphasis on the idea of immersing children in an environment. For this reason, post affect scores were chosen but the limitations that arise from not sampling during the activity are noted. However, we felt justified in using this approach with children given that, though often the affective “rebound” phenomena can mask between condition differences when capturing affect post activity in adults, various studies suggest that this is less of a concern in children were post activity affect may still offer useful information regarding the activities and subsequent behaviour (Sheppard and Parfitt, 2008; Hallgren et al., 2010; Dunton et al., 2014; Budzynski-Seymour et al., 2019). Future PA research which aims to have an influence over any aspect of the environment targeting the affective response should consider novel ways by which to collect affective responses during the activity that have limited impact on any immersion intended, in addition to ensuring pre- and post-measures are also taken.

Finally, though it may be considered an oversight that we did not collect pre activity measures, and of course by design we did not collect measures during activity, pre-activity measures were not deemed necessary in order to identify a between condition effect in our present design (notwithstanding that post measures are predictive of subsequent PA in children anyway). Going back to the aim of the research, this was focused on the differences in affect between the conditions, rather than the change in affect reported. Though of course pre-activity measures would have allowed our estimates of effect to be presented as pre-post delta scores which for some may enhance interpretability, baseline measures in trials including randomised cross-over designs are primarily for the purpose of increasing precision of such estimates through adjustment as a covariate and removing bias that may arise from regression to the mean. However, Senn (2002) notes that such approaches must first meet certain assumptions; that it is genuinely believed that the baseline scores are predictive of the treatment effect, and that the second condition is not in any way impacted by the previous treatment. Future work could include a true baseline (i.e. prior to either treatment) in addition to suitable washout periods such that subsequent baseline measures can also be considered to be independent. Though ultimately the treatment effect estimator (i.e. the difference between the two conditions) is the same in either regard; indeed, the approach of baseline measurement adjustment in cross-over designs is analogous to that of analysis of covariance with baseline adjustment in between group pre-post designs (Senn, 2002) and in such cases whether presenting estimators as the treatment effect between conditions for the delta, or the post scores, they are mathematically equivalent (Laird, 1983).

Additional Information

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