Cross-cultural validation of mood profile clusters in a sport and exercise context

Parsons-Smith, Terry, and Machin (2017) recently identified and described six mood profile clusters, representing various combinations of mood scores. The present study investigated whether the same clusters were evident in an Italian language, sport and exercise context. The Italian Mood Scale (ITAMS; Quartiroli, Terry, & Fogarty, 2017) was administered online to 950 Italian-speaking sport participants (659 females, 284 males, 7 unspecified; age range = 16–63 yr., M = 25.03, SD = 7.62). Seeded k-means cluster analysis identified six distinct patterns of mood responses, termed the iceberg, inverse iceberg, inverse Everest, shark fin, surface, and submerged profiles, which closely resembled those reported among English-speaking participants (Parsons-Smith et al., 2017). Between-group differences in the distribution of specific mood profiles emerged for gender and age. Findings supported the cross-cultural generalizability of the six mood profiles and offer new research avenues into their antecedents, correlates and behavioral consequences in Italian-language contexts. Future research should explore whether novel mood profiles associate with outcomes such as performance and risk of psychopathology, and whether the profiles are distributed in predictable ways across various populations of interest