Anxiety in Sport: Trait and State Anxiety
Anxiety is a negative response to a perceived threat, defined as a state of nervousness and worry felt before or during a sporting performance. It often stems from how a performer perceives the importance of a situation – e.g. one player looking forward to a cup final may feel excitement, while another may feel anxious about letting the team down.
- Competitive trait anxiety is a disposition – part of a performer's general make-up – to feel nervous in most sporting situations, regardless of the actual importance of the event. A performer high in trait anxiety tends to feel nervous before all competitions
- Competitive state anxiety is a more temporary response to a specific situation in the moment – e.g. feeling anxious about taking a penalty in a hockey match. The amount of state anxiety experienced can vary throughout a game, and can depend on the score and how much time is left
- There is a link between trait and state anxiety – a performer high in trait anxiety is more likely to experience high state anxiety when faced with a stressful situation, especially if they believe others are watching or evaluating their performance
Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety
The impact of anxiety on sport performance can be negative and is shown in two ways: cognitive and somatic.
- Cognitive anxiety is psychological and refers to the irrational thoughts and worries that occur before or during performance. A performer may believe they do not have the ability to complete a task, and this can result in a lack of concentration and loss of self-confidence – e.g. a player being asked to mark a bigger and more physical opponent may doubt they will be able to cope
- Somatic anxiety is physiological – it is the physical response of the body to a competitive situation. Symptoms include increased heart rate, sweating, and increased muscular tension, and these can often be felt worst at the start of a game before easing once the game gets underway
- Cognitive anxiety has a negative, linear relationship with performance – as cognitive anxiety increases, performance steadily worsens. Somatic anxiety instead follows an inverted-U relationship – increases in somatic anxiety can improve performance up to a point, after which further increases impair performance. In short, greater cognitive anxiety is consistently worse for performance, while a limited amount of somatic anxiety is not necessarily harmful
Measuring Anxiety: Questionnaires
There are three main methods used to measure anxiety in sport: self-report questionnaires, observation, and physiological measures.
- A questionnaire asks a performer to answer a series of questions about their emotions in different situations, in order to measure or assess anxiety. This method is quick, cheap and efficient, and large numbers of players can be assessed at once, with results easily compared
- However, self-report questionnaires can be invalid or unreliable – players may not understand a question and give an answer that does not reflect how they truly feel, or may give the socially desirable answer rather than the true one. Answers may also depend on mood, and rushed responses can lead to inaccurate results
- The Sports Competition Anxiety Test (SCAT), developed by Martens in 1977, is an example of a questionnaire used to measure anxiety, consisting of a series of 15 statements designed to measure how a player responds to competitive sporting situations
- The SCAT test was later extended by Martens in 1990 to become the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory (CSAI-2). This version can distinguish between somatic and cognitive anxiety and should be completed an hour prior to an event to gain an accurate result – the test includes a measure of self-confidence in addition to cognitive and somatic anxiety, using a maximum score of 36 for each subscale, allowing coaches to identify how players deal with anxiety and stress and select appropriate techniques to help reduce it
Measuring Anxiety: Observation and Physiological Measures
- Observation involves gaining a measure of anxiety simply by watching the performer during training or competition. This is a realistic approach, as it studies the performer in a real sporting environment, but it is time-consuming and results are based on the subjective opinions of observers, who also need to know what the performer normally behaves like so that changes from the norm can be noticed – if the performer knows they are being watched, their behaviour may change, making the results unreliable
- Physiological measures assess anxiety using a physical response from the body, such as increased heart rate, increased levels of sweating, increases in rate of respiration, and increased levels of hormone secretion. These measures have the advantage of being factual, objective data, so comparisons can easily be made, and recent advances in technology allow heart rate to be measured by an electronic device contained within the clothing of the performer and relayed immediately to the coach while the game is in motion
- The difficulty with physiological measures is that training is often required so that coaches can learn how to use the devices, the cost of items may deter amateur performers from using them, and in some cases wearing the measuring device (such as a heart rate monitor) may restrict movement in sport, or the performer may be aware they are being measured, causing additional stress and a false reading