Dominance threat display for victory and achievement in competition context

Abstract

We explored whether a dominance threat display as result of victory in agonistic encounters is actually produced in real life competition settings by examining the first whole body reactions produced by winners of the medal matches from three Olympic judo competitions, one of which included a sample of athletes who were blind. Winners displayed behavioral signals that were characterized into three categories, Expansion, Aggression, and Attention. These behavioral characteristics overlapped with descriptions of dominance displays in the previous literature. Other findings have suggested that these behaviors may be labeled as triumph. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.