Towards the Psychology of Sports Hedonestic Index
What makes tennis play, as highlighted in the video, enjoyable to watch?
Aesthetic appeal for visual stimuli (e.g. painting, photograph) depends on its (a) context, (b) content, and (c) composition. For sports events, it might not be appropriate to discuss the aesthetic appeal, despite 'beautiful' being a regularly used adjective in sports commentating. The term sports enjoyment is used to refer to the athletes' positive emotions for the sports activities. I'm not really sure what term can be used to represent "the hedonic pleasure experienced by sports spectators".
Gârdan et al (2020) use the term emotional involvement to describe the consumption of sports events. However, they did not provide a detailed description of the nature of sports events that arouse the emotions. Focusing on emotions might be too restrictive as cognitive and behavioral involvement are also important for hedonic experiences.
We can focus on the hedonic objects themselves and use terms like aesthetic appeal, aesthetic quality, entertainment value, or mesmerisiment (if I may coin this term to mean the ability of the object to capture attention) to communicate their attractiveness.
Or, we can focus on the 'eyes of the beholder' and use terms like emotional involvement, absorption (from organizational psychology), or transcendence state.
In psychology, getting the appropriate words to describe a behavior or a category of behavior is in itself a challenge.
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