depends on whether they can either bring themselves up or take
themselves down, (cited in Selvey, 1998, p. 2; italics mine)Similar sentiments were expressed by Sam Torrance, the captain of the victorious
European golf team before the 2002 Ryder Cup, when he urged his players to use their
nervous energy effectively (see quote at the beginning of this chapter). Given the
importance of anxiety control in sport, how can athletes manage to calm themselves
down before or during a competition? More generally, what does “anxiety” mean to
athletes and does it help or hinder their performance? What causes it and how can it be
measured in sport settings? The purpose of this chapter is to provide answers to these and
other questions raised by the study of arousal and anxiety in sport.
The chapter is organised as follows. The first section will explore the nature, causes
and types of anxiety in sport performers as well as its meaning for the athletes
themselves. In the second section, various ways of measuring anxiety in athletes will be
evaluated briefly. The third part of the chapter will review research findings on the
relationship between anxiety and athletic performance. This section will also feature a
discussion of the nature and causes of “choking” under pressure in sport. In the next part,
the topic of anxiety control will be addressed. This section will provide several practical
techniques used by athletes to cope with pressure situations in sport. The fifth section will
indicate some unresolved issues and new directions in research on anxiety in athletes.
Finally, I shall present a practical suggestion for a research project in this field.
Anxiety in athletesAccording to Onions (1996), the term anxiety is derived from the Latin word angere,
meaning “to choke”. This Latin root is interesting because choking under pressure is
widespread in sport (see later in chapter). In sport psychology, anxiety refers to an
unpleasant emotion which is characterised by vague but persistent feelings of
apprehension and dread (Cashmore, 2002). A similar view of this construct was provided
by Buckworth and Dishman (2002) who defined anxiety as a state of “worry,
apprehension, or tension that often occurs in the absence of real or obvious danger” (p.
116). Typically, the tension felt by anxious people is accompanied by a heightened state
of physiological arousal mediated by the autonomic nervous system.
In order to understand anxiety properly, we need to explore its psychological
components and also to distinguish it from similar constructs such as “fear” (a brief
emotional reaction to a stimulus that is perceived as threatening; Cashmore, 2002) and
“arousal” (a diffuse state of bodily alertness or “readiness”; ibid.). The latter distinctions
are very important because anxiety research in sport has been plagued by conceptual
confusion (Gould, Greenleaf and Krane, 2002; Woodman and Hardy, 2001; Zaichkowsky
and Baltzell, 2001). For example, some researchers have used the terms anxiety and
arousal interchangeably even though these constructs have different meanings.
"Psyching up" and "calming down": anxiety in sport 67