Is Choking under Pressure a Consequence of Skill-Focus or Increased Distractibility? Results from a Tennis Serve Task

Chris Englert, Raôul R. D. Oudejans

Department of Sport Psychology, Institute of Sports and Sports Sciences, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
MOVE Research Institute Amsterdam, Faculty of Human Movement Sciences, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

DOI: 10.4236/psych.2014.59116                

Abstract

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that athletes often choke in high pressure situations because anxiety can affect attention regulation and in turn performance. There are two competing theoretical approaches to explain the negative anxiety-performance relationship. According to skillfocus theories, anxious athletes’ attention is directed at how to execute the sport-specific movements which interrupts execution of already automatized movements in expert performers. According to distraction theories, anxious athletes are distractible and focus less on the relevant stimuli. We tested these competing assumptions in a between-subject design, as semi-professional tennis players were either assigned to an anxiety group (n = 25) or a neutral group (n = 28), and performed a series of second tennis serves into predefined target areas. As expected, anxiety was negatively related to serve accuracy. However, mediation analyses with the bootstrapping method revealed that this relationship was fully mediated by self-reported distraction and not by skill-focus.

Keywords

Choking, Distraction, Skill-Focus, Self-Focus, Sport

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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