TITLE:
Is Choking under Pressure a Consequence of Skill-Focus or Increased Distractibility? Results from a Tennis Serve Task
AUTHORS:
Chris Englert, Raôul R. D. Oudejans
KEYWORDS:
Choking, Distraction, Skill-Focus, Self-Focus, Sport
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.9,
July
21,
2014
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.