This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. In our recently completed intervention study commencing in 1999, we have been examining the mechanisms of physical activity behavior by tracking adolescent females for a full school year in a controlled exercise intervention. This intervention was unique in several ways: 1) it targeted sedentary, unfit adolescent females; 2) it tracked not only behavior and fitness over time but also likely psychosocial mediators of behavior change (e.g., self-efficacy, social support, perceived barriers to activity, etc ); and 3) it incorporated both psychosocial and physiological hypotheses in an integrated study with a physiological endpoint. Results demonstrate that the intervention was successful in terms of enhancing physical fitness and physical activity levels among sedentary adolescent females; yet, none of the proposed psychosocial mediators assessed were able to explain the behavior change, and the impact of the intervention on participants' fitness (i.e., VO2max, percent body fat) was minimal. What these findings suggest is that we need to move in new directions in order to identify the salient factors shaping adolescent physical activity behavior and use this knowledge to design more effective interventions for promoting increased activity. That is, we need to gain a better understanding of the natural process by which adolescents become increasingly sedentary with maturation, so that we can do a better job of reversing this process. The currently proposed study extends our findings to date by testing a novel biobehavioral model drawn from recent theoretical and empirical work. This work focuses on exercise-related affect (both acute and enduring) as a dominant factor shaping adolescent physical activity behavior . The role of exercise-associated affect as a factor shaping levels of physical activity participation is an area that has been seriously understudied. Two distinct types of affect have been proposed to contribute to individual behavior choices in terms of physical activity participation: acute exercise-induced affect, and global or enduring exercise-associated affect. The first refers to the transient, immediate mood effects that occur following a single exercise bout, whereas the second refers to an individuals' more pervasive, integrated perception of how much s/he enjoys exercising. Both types of exercise-associated affect will be explored in this proposal, as described in the following hypotheses.
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