No Evidence for Changes in Emotional Reactivity Following a 12‐Week Exercise Intervention: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Physical exercise is associated with numerous psychological benefits, and recent studies suggest it may modulate emotional reactivity-typically enhancing responses to positive stimuli and attenuating responses to negative ones. However, most existing evidence concerns acute effects following a single exercise session, leaving it unclear whether regular exercise can induce more stable changes in emotional reactivity. To address this, we examined the effects of a 12-week exercise intervention on self-reported and neural indices of emotional reactivity. Physically inactive young adults were randomly assigned to an experimental group (n = 32), which completed a supervised cycling ergometer program, or to a passive control group (n = 30). Emotional reactivity was assessed at baseline, mid-intervention (6 weeks), and post-intervention (12 weeks) in response to emotional images using both self-reported ratings (valence and arousal) and the late positive potential (LPP) of event-related potentials (ERPs). Results showed no evidence that the intervention influenced either self-reported or neural indices of emotional reactivity at the group level. However, exploratory analyses suggested that greater improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness were associated with enhanced LPP responses to positive emotional stimuli, highlighting the potential importance of fitness gains for emotional benefits. Overall, these findings suggest that emotional reactivity in healthy individuals is relatively stable and less amenable to change through long-term exercise-particularly at the level of subjective experience-while neural measures may be more sensitive to exercise-related modulation under specific conditions. These results also support the notion that distinct mechanisms drive acute and long-term exercise effects on emotional reactivity.