Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

tied inextricably to what they achieve, they are especially likely to become nervous at the
prospect of defeat as it constitutes a threat to their self-worth.

Lack of confidence

Some sport psychologists have speculated that athletes who have little confidence in their
own abilities are likely to experience high levels of anxiety in competitive situations. This
hypothesis is supported by research (e.g., Martin and Gill, 1991) which shows that
runners who scored highly in self-confidence reported experiencing little cognitive
anxiety.
In summary, at least three conclusions have emerged from studying anxiety in
athletes. First, even the world’s best athletes get nervous before competition. Second,
many athletes and coaches believe that competitive performance is determined
significantly by the ability to control and channel one’s nervous energy effectively.
Finally, we have learned that anxiety tends to affect people at different levels—via their
thinking, feeling and behaviour. In short, anxiety causes athletes to think pessimistically
about the future and to feel tense and agitated.

Measuring anxiety in athletes

In the previous section, we learned that the construct of anxiety has three different
dimensions: cognitive, somatic and behavioural. Within sport psychology, attempts to
measure anxiety have focused largely on the first and second of these dimensions, with
virtually no research available on the behavioural aspect of this construct. Of the
measures developed, the most popular tools for anxiety assessment have been self-report
scales—probably as a result of the availability and convenience of these instruments (see
R.E.Smith, Smoll and Wiechman, 1998, for a review of anxiety measurement in sport
performers).

Physiological measures

As anxiety is analogous to a fear reaction, it has a strong physiological basis. Thus
Spielberger (1966) proposed that anxiety states are “accompanied by or associated with
activation of the autonomic nervous system” (p. 17). As we have seen, this activation
results in such typical symptoms of anxiety as elevated heart rate, increased blood
pressure, fast and shallow breathing, sweaty palms and tense musculature. If such indices
could be measured conveniently, they would facilitate research in this area as they are
relatively unaffected by response sets such as people’s tendency to guess the purposes of
questionnaire items so that they can present themselves in a maximally desirable light (a
tendency called “social desirability”). Unfortunately, physiological measures of anxiety
are relatively rare in sport psychology for at least five reasons. First, there is no single,
universally agreed physiological index of anxiety. Second, as athletes differ in the way in
which they interpret autonomic arousal (i.e., as facilitative or debilitative of their
performance), physiological measures of anxiety are of limited value. Third, these
measures assess arousal not anxiety. Fourth, physiological indices of arousal are not

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