Manju, Sudheesh, Steffi
Knes 204
For: Jennie Bradford
April 17.2013
Sports and performance anxiety often go hand-in-hand. Anxiety before or during athletic competitions can hinder your performance as an athlete. The coordinated movement required by athletic events becomes increasingly difficult when your body is in a tense state. A certain level of physical arousal is helpful and prepares us for competition. But when the physical symptoms of anxiety are too great, they may seriously interfere with your ability to compete. Similarly, a certain amount of worry about how you perform can be helpful in competition, but severe cognitive symptoms of anxiety such as negative thought patterns and expectations of failure can bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there is a substantial difference between how you perform during practice and how you do during competitions, anxiety may be affecting your performance.
The research question of our research is:
What is the correlation between anxiety and performance of elite and novice athletes preparing for a soccer tournament? The hypothesis of our research is the anxiety levels will be different in a novice and in an elite performer. High anxiety can affect the performance badly.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The zone of optimal functioning (ZOF) hypothesis of Y. L. Hanin suggests that each athlete has a specific bandwidth, or zone, of anxiety in which best performances will most likely be observed. The present study investigated the ZOF hypothesis within a multidimensional framework. Unique cognitive anxiety and somatic anxiety zones were identified, and it was hypothesized that athletes whose anxiety levels fell within these zones would be more successful than athletes whose anxiety levels were outside these zones. Results of separate cognitive and somatic anxiety ANOVAs on data from 16 female college soccer players indicated that poorest performances were observed when athletes '
References: Raglin, J. S., (1992). Exercise & Sport Sciences Reviews: Anxiety and Sport Performance.Vol 20. pp. 243-274. http://journals.lww.com Unknown