Psychological Characteristics of the Elite Performer: Its all in their head, part 3

Part 1: Personality
Part 2: Motivation

Part 3: ANXIETY AND AROUSAL

Athletes with a high tendency to perceive competitive situations as threatening, likely experience greater levels of “moment dependent” anxiety during game situations. This type and level of anxiety may lead to a predisposition to detrimental performances and therefore may not be evident in elite athletes. You’ll likely witness this anxiety trait in “chokers”. Regardless, all athletes, despite their level of ability, experience certain situations that increase anxiety.

Some examples: individual sports, competing away from one’s home arena or field, playoff games, and the role or position one plays on the team (i.e. goalkeeper).

However, looking specifically at skill levels and experience, higher performers generally report lower levels of “moment dependent” anxiety, lower levels of physiological anxiety symptoms, and view anxiety symptoms to be more facilitative toward their competitive performance. Essentially, athletes who tend to perform better than others generally demonstrate the ability to use their coping skills to manage natural anxiety responses both before and during competition.

Relaxation
Self-talk
Cognitive restructuring
Imagery

Recognizing that athletic performance is a complex behaviour, some researches have described the cusp catastrophe theory: the relationship between competitive anxiety and performance is dependent on an interplay between a spectrum of both cognitive state anxiety/arousal and physiological arousal. According to this theory, enhanced performance is predicted when one variable is balanced by the other and therefore, those athletes displaying this optimum balance tend to perform better than others.

It also seems clear that those athletes who view their anxiety symptoms as necessary for performance tend to display higher performance abilities and success.

Tomorrow’s post: Stress and Coping