Theories in Interpretation of Anxiety and Performance in Sports - Essay Example

With Reference to Theory and Research, Discuss the Proposition that Anxiety may not Necessarily Impair Performance Introduction: Anxieties have oftenbeen denoted to be culprits in compromised performances in sports activities. Given the high-pressure situation of competitive sports, anxiety is conventionally believed to affect performance negatively. Anxiety is a set of negative affective states associated with an inability to cope with stress placed on an individual by environmental demands. Researcher have found that elite and professional athletes are nurtured and schooled in the negative effects of anxiety and 'negative' emotional states on sport performance, and many athletes frequently and regularly seek the help of sport psychologists for assistance with anxiety control. Despite the fact that current studies demonstrate that the majority of sport psychology consultations involve anxiety management, the current trend of thought is that some dose of anxiety is a necessary emotion for appropriate performance. Most performers in sports and exercise would believe that ascertaining self and self-efficacy are important personal parameters for performance in a competition (Carpenter et al., 2004, 3255-3265). Self-efficacy beliefs are pivotal for performance in sports. Self-efficacy has been deemed to arise from several sources of information about a person's confidence or subjective beliefs in their skills or ability to affect outcomes by performing a given behaviour or action. Performance accomplishment is intimately related to previous successful personal experiences with the action or the behaviour. Psychological impetus in sports performance may arise from physiological states such as autonomic arousal. However, the most important factors influencing performance are related to psychological states or emotional states. Negative emotional states associated with threat in achievement contexts such as anxiety and worry, or positive emotional states associated with approach motivation such as state self-confidence also affect self-efficacy beliefs. Research has shown that affect is an integral component of the attitude construct in extensions of the theory of planned behaviour. Moreover models of social cognition accept that social information from the environment in the form of stimuli and learnt personal belief systems are processed neuropsychologically and serve as the bases for motives, decisions, intentions, and behavioural responses. Therefore, these cannot happen in a vacuum, devoid of feeling states or emotions. Emotions such as anxiety can also operate as response or outcome states as well as sources of information for attributions, judgements, beliefs, expectations, desires, intentions, and other social cognitive constructs, which influence performance (Gould, Petlichkoff, and Weinberg, 1984, 289-304). The study of sport and exercise psychology has dealt with emotions in the close quarters with the attempt to study the effects of a variety of emotions on performance in this area. A vast majority of the research deals with a single emotion, anxiety. The previous findings were that a higher level of cognitive anxiety can be detrimental to performance in a number of varying tasks and situations with competition. It can impair performance in memory tasks and complex motor tasks such as indoor sports such as climbing or free-throw shooting in basketball. In this assignment, the objective is to critically examine more literature to see whether anxiety has the role that researchers believe or it has something else at all to offer in sports performance. Researchers have recorded positive effects of anxiety on motor tasks, tasks involving solving of anagrams, in free-throw and rebound shooting in basket ball. This is an apparently contradictory finding, putting practitioners at a fix whether to treat anxiety in sports or not, since if it is helpful, it would at least momentarily help improved performance, which is also the goal of sports psychology. Anxiety, which is a known negative emotion, has many physical expressions, but emotionally or psychologically, these people also suffer from physiological effects of catecholamine released as a result of anxiety. Anxious athletes are observed to report all these symptoms along with thoughts of fear of negative performance, a negative expectation of failure, leading to inability to concentrate. These have been attributed to either a tendency or a psychological state due to competition and presence of audience or personal variables such as appraisal of the event being of importance (Gould, Greenleaf, and Krane, 2002, 207-241). Thus anxiety has a specific pathology and characteristic features. Early research that tends to treat anxiety as a trait tends to see it as a pathological condition in such a way that this was considered as a stable facet of the personality of the sportsperson; however, later it was conceded that it is both a trait and state. The state anxiety varies significantly from the trait anxiety in that state anxiety is associated with concomitant arousal of the autonomic nervous system. Thus it has a correlation with proximal situational factors and the individual's interpretation of them. This also generated the concept of self-confidence to account for the positive aspects of anxiety, and this resulted mainly from the researchers' understanding that in terms of anxiety in competitive sports, the state of anxiety may better be able to explain and predict behaviour (Jones, 1995, 449-478). The basic fact remaining the same, other theories have been proposed to explain the complex interaction between anxiety, arousal, and performance based on researches. The processing efficiency theory of cusp catastrophe model is one of the explanations. In contrast to the previous theories of debilitative effects of anxiety on performance, these theories propose that there is a potential of heightened cognitive and somatic anxiety to have a positive or facilitative effect on performance. Jones has suggested that actually the interpretation of anxiety response and its directions determine the impact. Thus taking an example, appraisal of intensity of competition as threatening, sense of coping ability, control over resources to cope would ultimately determine whether the anxiety would be debilitative or facilitative. This is a very attractive theory and almost flawless, but the limitation of this theory include ignorance of the factor of the level of physical arousal. This led to the development of catastrophe theory (Hardy, 1990, 140-156). This apparent controversy and contradiction have been attempted to be solved by many researchers. The cusp catastrophe model is one of the examples. Based on previous research of Thorn, Hardy proposed this model of anxiety and performance in order to solve the apparent incongruities in the effects of anxiety in sports performance (Noteboom, Barnholt, and Enoka, 2001, 2093-2101). The effect of anxiety on performance was more complex than was apparent since it was found that anxiety influenced performance actually is a multimodal construct resulting from contributions from cognitive component, negative expectations and cognitive concerns about oneself, the situation at hand, and potential consequences and a physical arousal. It is an observed fact that very low or very high levels of arousal resulted in inferior performance of fine motor skills and complex cognitive tasks when compared to intermediate arousal levels in competitive sport led to several researchers proposing that an optimal level of arousal was the most effective for performance. This relationship was referred to as optimal arousal theory or the inverted-U hypothesis, named because of the shape of the curve representing the relationship on arousal-performance axes. This would mean that cognitive anxiety has a positive relationship with performance with a low arousal, and with high arousal, cognitive anxiety will have adverse effects on performance. Since it is a bimodal relationship, with a low cognitive anxiety, the physiological arousal will have an inverted-U relationship with performance, and with high cognitive anxiety, increased level of physiological arousal will lead to a catastrophic diminution of performance. If there is a catastrophic drop in performance, to bring the performance back to normal would need an adjustment of physiological arousal back to normal (Hardy and Parfitt, 1991, 163-178). To sum up, the performance is related physiological arousal and level of anxiety. In fact, for sports needing gross motor activities and large muscle groups, such as, weightlifting, athletics, and boxing, an optimal performance would need high arousal, so a low cognitive anxiety would be helpful for optimum performance; whereas in sports where fine motor skills are prevalent, such as in golf, a much lower level of arousal would be necessary, so a higher cognitive anxiety would be useful for optimal performance (Neuman and Thomas, 2008, 892-897). Conclusion: In conclusion, there are many theories in interpretation of anxiety and performance in sports. Given the complexity of the matter, it is very difficult to predict which sports person will respond in what way, but it is very prominent given the mathematical construct of the relationships between performance, emotion related to anxiety, and arousal, these can be manipulated in such a manner that controlled anxiety can occur in an optimum manner in a specific sport, so the performance can be optimized or improved. Moreover, a better performer is usually acutely emotional in certain areas, and these indicate that sports psychologist should optimize the emotion to extract the best performance. Moreover, future may reveal more specifics about this, so medications may be optimized to optimize performance by invoking controlled anxiety. Reference List Carpenter, M. G., Frank, J. S., Adkin, A. L. , Paton, A. , and Allum, J.H.J., (2004). Influence of Postural Anxiety on Postural Reactions to Multi-Directional Surface Rotations. Journal of Neurophysiology; 92: 3255 - 3265. Gould, D., Greenleaf, C. and Krane, V. (2002) Arousal-anxiety and sport behavior. In T.S. Horn (ed.), Advances in Sport Psychology (pp. 207-41). Champaign, Il: Human Kinetics. Gould, D., Petlichkoff, L. and Weinberg, R.S. (1984) Antecedents of, temporal changes in, and relationships between CSAI-2 components. Journal of Sport Psychology, 6: 289-304 Hardy, L. (1990). Testing the predictions of the cusp catastrophe model of anxiety and performance. Sport psychologist, 10, 140-156. Hardy, L. and Parfitt, C.G. (1991) A catastrophe model of anxiety and performance. British Journal of Psychology, 82: 163-78. Jones, G. (1995) More than just a game: research developments and issues in competititive anxiety in sport. British Journal of Psychology, 86: 449-78. Neuman, LD. and Thomas, PR., (2008). A camera-based scoring system for evaluating performance accuracy during a golf putting task. Behavioral Research Methods; 40: 892 - 897. Noteboom, JT., Barnholt, KR., and Enoka, RM., (2001). Activation of the arousal response and impairment of performance increase with anxiety and stressor intensity. Journal of Applied Physiology; 91: 2093 - 2101 Read More