Face-gain appraisal and event-based social comparison in the association between novelty motivation and sustained positive sport experience in highland paragliding among urban professional women in China

Brief adventure-sport experiences can remain psychologically meaningful after participation, but the post-event processes linking pre-event motivation with sustained positive sport experience remain under-specified. This four-wave time-lagged observational study examined whether novelty motivation before recreational highland paragliding was prospectively associated with sustained positive sport experience 1 week later, and whether this association involved two temporally ordered post-event processes: face-gain appraisal immediately after the flight and event-based social comparison during the following days. Urban professional women in China completed surveys 1, 3 days before the activity, within 1 h after the flight, 24, 72 h after the activity, and approximately 7 days later; the final eligible sample included 454 participants. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the distinction among the four focal constructs. Latent structural paths and baseline-covariate adjusted bootstrap models showed positive indirect associations through face-gain appraisal [(b = 0.125, 95% CI (0.083, 0.173)], event-based social comparison (b = 0.072, 95% CI [0.044, 0.105]), and the sequential appraisal-to-comparison pathway [(b = 0.031, 95% CI (0.018, 0.048)]. Sensitivity analyses adjusting for activity-context variables, attrition using inverse-probability weighting, and social-media sharing yielded the same substantive pattern. The findings indicate that sustained positive sport experience after highland paragliding is associated with pre-event novelty motivation and with the social-evaluative and comparative meanings attached to the activity after participation. Practically, the findings may inform safety-centered communication, credible recognition of accomplishment, and autonomy-supportive reflective sharing among paragliding providers, sport-tourism agencies, and women's sport organizations. The study contributes to sport psychology by conceptualizing positive adventure-sport experience as a temporally ordered motivational, appraisal-based, and comparative process. Given the observational self-report design, the results describe prospective associations rather than experimental causal effects.