600 Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 2013, 35, 600-611 © 2013 Human Kinetics, Inc. JOURNAL OF SPORT EXERCISE PSYCHOLOGY Official Journal of NASPSPA www.JSEP-Journal.com ORIGINAL RESEARCH Guillaume Martinent is with the Centre de Recherche et d’Innovation sur le Sport, Université de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Villeurbanne, France. Michel Nicolas is with the Laboratory of Socio Psychology and Management of Sport, SPMS (EA 4180), Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France. Patrick Gaudreau is with the University of Ottawa, School of Psychology, Ottawa, ON, Canada. Mickaël Campo is with CETAPS, the Faculty of Sport Sciences, Université de Rouen, Mont Saint Aignan, France. A Cluster Analysis of Affective States Before and During Competition Guillaume Martinent, 1 Michel Nicolas, 2 Patrick Gaudreau, 3 and Mickaël Campo 4 1 Université de Lyon—Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1; 2 Université de Bourgogne; 3 University of Ottawa; 4 Université de Rouen The purposes of the current study were to identify affective proﬁles of athletes both before and during the competition and to examine differences between these proﬁles on coping and attainment of sport goals among a sample of 306 athletes. The results of hierarchical (Ward’s method) and nonhierarchical (k means) cluster analyses revealed four different clusters both before and during the competition. The four clusters were very similar at the two measurement occasions: high positive affect facilitators (n = 88 and 81), facilitators (n = 75 and 25), low affect debilitators (n = 83 and 127), and high negative affect debilitators (n = 60 and 73). Results of MANOVAs revealed that coping and attainment of sport achievement goal signiﬁcantly differed across the affective proﬁles. Results are discussed in terms of current research on positive and negative affective states. Keywords: cluster analysis, coping, directionality, affective proﬁles Affects are ubiquitous to life and inherently asso- ciated with the ups and downs of sport competitions. Despite their idiosyncratic speciﬁcities, affective states can be regrouped in broad dimensions according to their pleasant versus unpleasant valence. Positive affective states represent optimal states of energy, concentration, and pleasurable engagement, whereas negative affective states denote a sense of distress and unpleasant engage- ment (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Athletes can experience a variety of positive and negative affects likely to change before and during competitions. These affective states have been shown to facilitate or impair performance by affecting the behavioral, motivational, physical, and/or cognitive functioning of competitive athletes (e.g., Hanin, 2007; Martinent & Ferrand, 2009). Researchers in sport psychology have tradition- ally focused on the intensity of affective states (with a predominant focus on anxiety). In recent years, growing empirical attention has been allocated to the underlying functional meanings (i.e., directionality) that athletes are attaching to their positive and negative affective states (e.g., Hanin, 2007; Martinent & Ferrand, 2009). Despite their respective pleasant and unpleasant valence, high levels of positive and negative affect can be perceived either as facilitating or debilitating for sport performance (e.g., Martinent & Ferrand, 2009). A positive affective state could thus be interpreted as facilitating performance for a certain athlete at a particular time. In contrast, the same affective state could be interpreted as debilitative for the same athlete at other times. The goal of this study was to propose and investigate a framework, derived from the Lazarus (2000) contemporary cognitive motivational relational theory (CMRT; see Neil, Hanton, Mellalieu, & Fletcher, 2011), in which the differential coexistence of two core facets of affective states (intensity and direc- tionality) are used to generate multivariate proﬁles of affects presumed to differ across athletes and across time within the same athlete. This study also examined whether these affective proﬁles are differentially associated with the coping strategies and goal attainment of athletes in a sport competition. Intensity and Direction of Affective States Although researchers in sport psychology have tradi- tionally focused on anxiety (e.g., Mellalieu, Hanton, & Fletcher, 2006), growing empirical attention has examined the level or the intensity of affective states experienced by athletes in competitive sport (e.g., Hanin, 2007). Although research on intensity has contributed to our understanding of affective states, several scholars have outlined the promises of considering their direc- tionality in addition to their intensity (e.g., Martinent, Campo, & Ferrand, 2012; Mellalieu, Hanton, & Jones, 2003). The idea that athletes can perceive an affective