World Cup College

Marco Tardelli

By Dr Paul: It is the deep breath before the plunge. The calm before the storm. The gasp before the roar. The eve of the World Cup!

In the build-up to this event, an event World Cup College has been set up to accompany my excitement levels have become almost fever pitch. This week I bought a Panini sticker album, and today I been planning where I’ll be watching Serbia v Ghana, Ivory Coast v Portugal and Italy v Paraguay. In short, my love of the World Cup extends further than the football on the pitch: the social interaction, the cultural experience, and tapping into memories and emotions first experienced during childhood.

Everyone can remember their first World Cup experience. For me it was Spain 1982. Coming from Italian stock, I remember my mother getting more and more excited as the tournament wore on. I remember excitement attached to games like England v France, Algeria’s unlikely victory over West Germany, Honduras, New Zealand, West Germany v France in the semi-final, Italy v Brazil – the list goes on. Spain 1982 has underwritten every World Cup I have experienced since. For every frenzied goal celebration of pure joy, I immediately think back to Falcao and Tardelli. For every Portuguese away kit, I think Peru. For every cultured midfielder, I think Socrates. And for every African team, I think Cameroon.

Nineteen-eighty-two was a safe place. I was nine-years-old, living with my family in bucolic Warwickshire, and replayed every game I saw in the back garden in what I remember to be golden sun light. It is these pure memories of excitement I plug into on the eve of every World Cup.

Although Michael J Apter’s study of excitement focuses on risk takers such as racing drivers, mountain climbers, stuntmen etc who crave excitement, his conclusions do extend to memory attachment and the way our mind works when excitement takes hold. Parapathic emotions, he explains, describe experiences where all emotions are enjoyed, even unpleasant ones like fear, anger, grief and disgust, in the presence of detachment.

In a World Cup context, one enjoys all the emotions that one experiences out of empathy with the players, coaches and fans. We watch from the television, which supplies the crucial levels of detachment that parapathic emotions need to function. Apter goes on say that this safety zone and detachment is associated with a particular zone of experience (or arousal). Within a specific zone, any arousing emotion (even supposedly negative feelings) will be agreeable. It’s this arousal that makes us crave more.

In a recent university paper (‘Visual perception, motor action, and the video game experience’ by Assistant Professor Ole Ertloev Hansen from Aalborg Univeristy), it takes Apter’s theories one step further by using Torben Grodal’s Moving Pictures book and theories of PECMA (Perception Emotion Cognition Motor Action) on people experiencing video games. Hansen writes: [Grodal] demonstrates how the experience of film can be perceived as a flow from perception to actual motor action, although this action is suppressed. The level of tension is derived from emotional labelling and cognitive processing which is applied to the specific emotional stimulus. This model suggests that the organic system which enables humans to apprehend and negotiate their immediate environment, the embodied mind, is also used to comprehend audiovisual depictions.

Grodal also contemplated the means by which we process and retain narratives. Light stimulates the retina and is converted into signals that are passed to the visual cortex, where the signal follows a series of mechanisms. These activate further parts of the brain in order to fortify significant forms and activate memory patterns so that corresponding items can be located. These sense-making mental processes relate closely to narrative schemes.

If we use Grodal and Apter’s ideas and theories, and apply them to real world narratives, it’s obvious that my World Cup memory patterns were created in Spain 1982 and will now reverberate in South Africa 2010. The arousal process has already started. By 4pm tomorrow afternoon, they should be off the scale and the narrative I am all too familiar with will start all over again.

Even though I know they’re no good for me,
It’s the risk I take for the chemistry. Alexandra Burke

Pain and pleasure are apparently at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Pain makes us feel bad, pleasure makes us feel good: these should therefore be non-overlapping phenomena. If pain makes somebody feel good, then this might be considered contradictory or perverse. Masochism is the term used to describe the experience of enjoying pain, humiliation or disappointment.

The human brain has gone through a complex evolutionary process which actually means that pleasure and pain are not mutually exclusive cognitive categories. Sexual selection means that it makes sense for individuals to strive for the highest quality partner available. This is so that their offspring will contain genes from a fit and healthy partner, which means that their own genes will have greater likelihood of surviving through the generations.

The only difficulty of pursuing a mate who contains high quality genes is that this person will be extensively sought after. An individual who has acquired an alpha partner is presented with substantial risk of this partner leaving them or engaging in sexual liaisons with others. The chance of rejection is also higher in the first instance, as a popular individual can select from a broad pool of potential partners. There is thus significant risk attached to pursuing and retaining a highly regarded partner. As has been recognized though, those who secure these partners will be attaining the best survival chances for their own offspring. There is, therefore, a selective advantage conferred by masochism: those who could derive an endorphin rush from the disappointments of pursuing and maintaining a relationship with an alpha partner were more likely to pass their genes through the generations. Masochism is therefore an adaptation to the emotional risks which are taken when pursuing the best future for our own genes.

We can therefore now see that the almost joyous frustration and tears which are forthcoming when England lose are quite rational in terms of evolutionary psychology. As the striving for sexual success is an inextricable element of our being, masochism has become a more generalized disposition and applies to the pursuit of other triumphs. Masochism enables failure to be endured as it actually generates pleasure from this defeat. Those who are likely to persist with a course of action which might lead to success (such as following a middling team in an international football tournament) are those who can also endure the disappointments of failure. Because our distant cave-dwelling ancestor got into an endorphin-soaked lather over an aloof stunner in a loincloth, we now enjoy stomping up and down and crying when England are humbled at a major tournament.

Masochism is thus one of the reasons why England fans can continue to watch the team despite 44 years of hurt. Our national team represents us personally, so self-flagellation in defeat is an enjoyable pastime when a World Cup bid ends in failure. There is a certain pleasure to be derived from watching England fail in humiliating fashion, as Pearce, Waddle, Southgate or Batty fire tame or misplaced penalties towards (or not towards) the goal.

However, whilst masochism may be a functional cognitive corollary of striving, it becomes dysfunctional when it becomes a replacement for striving. In life, disappointment is always lurking as a probable outcome, so we may seek out and revel in pain because it provides an easier and more certain route to an endorphin rush than steady progress towards achievement. For example, a masochistic English public has the media it deserves. The England team had the broad support of the public and media throughout a convincing and successful qualification campaign. But when World Cup year arrived it has provided much better copy to pontificate over players’ personal problems – to such a degree that it is likely to impact negatively on the team’s performance in South Africa.