Arousal and Anxiety

• Arousal is the physiological state which increases when the environment places demands upon us. It includes increased heart rate and breathing rate.
• Anxiety is a negative emotional state of apprehension that we experience when we perceive that a situation is threatening. This includes having a sense of panic, sweating, and trembling.
• Stress is the body's way of responding to any demand or threat. The body releases stress hormones which rouse the body for emergency action. Prolonged stress includes headaches, low energy, and upset stomach.
• The Yerkes-Dodson law created the inverted U hypothesis that said the relationship between arousal and performance looks like an upside down U (or bell curve) where the zone of optimum performance is at moderate arousal. Beyond this, performance decreases gradually.
• State anxiety is a temporary emotional state due to a particular situation and varies from one moment to the next. It includes:

  • Cognitive anxiety - thoughts about lack of ability causing nervousness and difficulty concentrating. Increases the days before a competition and varies during the competition.
  • Somatic anxiety - physiological responses to anxiety such as high heart rate and nausea. It is low leading to the competition and increases dramatically hours before the event but decreases once it starts.

  Trait anxiety is a personality trait where every situation is seen as threatening.
• Martens developed the SCAT to measure trait anxiety with 15 items where the respondents select whether that is true for them rarely, sometimes or often. This calculates a score out of 30 and participants are rated as low, average or high in train anxiety.

  The first version was tested on 12-15 year olds in Chicago from mainly white middle class families.
• Martens also developed the CSAI-2 to measure state anxiety. It has 27 items. (9 for each of cognitive and somatic anxiety, and self-confidence) Three scores on a scale from 9-36 are obtained. It includes questions such as "I feel tense in my stomach". It is completed 48 hours, 24 hours, 2 hours, and 5 minutes before a competition. He found that cognitive anxiety increased steadily in the run up to the event and just before, while somatic anxiety increases steadily then peaks dramatically just before the event.
• Fazey and Hardy aimed to point out limitations of the inverted U hypothesis, make a distinction between somatic + cognitive anxiety and propose a new model to explain the link between performance and anxiety. The produced a monograph that found 3 main issues of inverted U hypothesis:

  1. Y+D operationalised arousal, anxiety and stress as the same,
  2. Y+D had no evidence to prove the inverted U hypothesis,
  3. Difficult to apply the hypothesis for predictions.

  Zeeman had said with too much stress the performance of an athlete fails.
• Fazey and Hardy proposed their own catastrophe model to explain the relationship between anxiety and performance. When arousal increases so does performance until the zone of optimum performance, when both somatic and cognitive anxiety become too high there is a catastrophic drop in performance (hysteresis). This means conscious control kicks in and athletes no longer have smooth automatic processing.
• Progressive Muscular Relaxation (PMR)

  • Used to reduce and manage levels of somatic anxiety and arousal.
  • Athlete will be trained in PMR which is a meditation to tense and relax difference muscle groups one at a time and told to practice this before important events.
  • Fazey and Hardy's research shows that reduced somatic anxiety leads to a reduced risk of a catastrophic drop in performance.
• Cognitive behavioural Therapy (CBT)

  • Athlete will work with a sport psychologist to rationalise and replace negative thoughts with positive ones.
  • Athlete should take CSAI-2 questionnaire and complete a 6-8 week course of CBT to address what negative thoughts they are having and train to replace these with positive ones.
  • Turner and Barker researched 4 elite cricket players with severe performance anxiety. After a course of CBT their anxiety significantly reduced.