World Cup 2014 & displacement behaviour

Hands on head after a missed open goal- displacement behaviour

Keep your eyes open this world cup for displacement behaviour.  It is such a common phenomenon that you may never have really paid attention to it before but in almost every game at certain key moments you will see it.

Those key moments relate to missed goals.  Now, anyone who watches or plays football knows that some missed goals are more painful than others.  The shot that misses the goal by a large margin and which, from the moment it leaves the boot, never looks like going close to goal is never as disappointing as the one that only just misses the target.  When we fully expect the ball to go into the back of the net but at the very last moment the ball veers away or goes past the post and not inside it, an automatic reaction occurs.  

This automatic reaction is one we all know well.  Consider this: excitement builds as the expectation of a goal rises, only to be suddenly and forcefully opposed by the realisation that it has missed and the sense of elation is simultaneously contradicted by one of disappointment.  This process is marked by the hands of the player (or often spectators too) suddenly being raised to the head and the fingers used to comb the hair or scalp in a smoothing or caressing action.  

But why does this happen?  Well, it marks disappointment and a defeated expectation but there is more to it than just this.  Physiologically speaking it indicates that two contradictory impulses are being experienced and producing a behaviour that has in fact no direct relevance to the situation in which it occurs.  I mean, how could raising your hands and passing them through your hair or resting them on your head be of any real use?

Most people fail to really pay attention to this action because it is so common or automatic that we take it for granted as a natural phenomenon of no significance.  But when one stops to think that it occurs at those specific moments when the tension between excitement and disappointment is at a certain point of balance, it assumes new meaning.  It is a classic case of a displacement behaviour, the purpose of which is to deactivate overloaded circuits and act as a reset so that the processing of fresh incoming sensory data can be resumed.  

As well as this act of self-grooming behaviour we often see players grooming each other too.  A player who has missed a goal and looks disappointed will often have his head touched or stroked by a team mate.  Grooming is just an automatic and innate human behaviour derived from our ancestral heritage.

You will see many cases of self-grooming (and mutual grooming) during this World Cup so keep your eyes peeled - especially for those specific moments when celebration behaviour and realisation of failure are at a point of balance and produce displacement actions.