The Adverse Effect of Anxiety on Dynamic Anticipation Performance

Abstract

Anticipation is a crucial perceptual-cognitive skill in fast-ball sports, and the effect of high anxiety on performance has attracted more attention from sports psychologists. Related studies mainly focus on the effect of anxiety on influencing processing efficiency and attentional control (top-down vs. bottom-up) during information processing in sport. Attentional Control Theory (ACT) has been supported by several studies. However, these studies have been criticized by the low ecological validity of task design, such as neglecting the dynamic process of anticipation, and inadequate performance analysis, such as analyzing response accuracy and time separately. Using temporal occlusion paradigm, we tested ACT in a dynamic anticipation process. Eighteen skilled and eighteen less-skilled table tennis players were required to anticipate the serves of opponents under dynamic task constraints (early vs. late occlusion) and anxiety conditions (high vs. low anxiety). High cognitive state anxiety decreased processing efficiency (response time/response accuracy) for both groups whereas performance effectiveness (response accuracy) did not differ. In addition, it negatively affected processing efficiency in early anticipation compared with late anticipation tasks, suggesting that high cognitive state anxiety may have a greater impact on top-down attentional control. Our findings provide support for ACT and show that anxiety impairs anticipation efficiency and performance, possibly due to an ineffectively attentional shift from external kinematic cues to internal long-term working memory. Findings also have implications for the adaptation of attentional strategies and anxiolytic training.

Pre and post-competitive anxiety and self-confidence and their relationship with technical-tactical performance in high-level men's padel players

“…Committing unforced errors may contribute to heightened state anxiety among winning players, since they may not like the idea of giving "free" points to the opponents through avoidable errors. And heightened anxiety levels indicate a decrease in sports performance (61,62) and anticipation efficiency (63). Hence, these players could benefit from working closely with a sport psychologist, to develop resilience strategies to effectively cope with the frustration of pressure stemming from errors (64), emphasizing techniques such as reframing perspectives on mistakes.…”

Precompetitive anxiety and self-confidence during the 2023 Finnish Padel championship in high level men’s players

“…Moments right before the actual competition begins, players tend to experience anxiety (Dosil, 2004). Such anxiety, commonly recognized as precompetitive anxiety (Cox, 2012), has been extensively studied in the recent past (Cuesta-Vargas and Vertedor Corpas, 2016;Correia and Rosado, 2019;Pineda-Espejel et al, 2021;Ren et al, 2022). This mental factor is widely acknowledged to have a profound impact on performance in sports competition, in addition to self-confidence (León-Prados et al, 2014;Pineda-Espejel et al, 2019).…”

Tennis vs padel: Precompetitive anxiety as a function of gender and competitive level

“…“He is anxious about playing” or “he has anxiety problems” are expressions increasingly used by professionals dedicated to the sports field. The influence of precompetitive anxiety on sport performance has focused the attention of many sport psychologists ( Gómez-López et al, 2020 ), being one of the most studied aspects in sport psychology in recent years ( Cuesta-Vargas and Vertedor, 2016 ; Correia and Rosado, 2019 ; Pineda-Espejel et al, 2021 ; Ren et al, 2022 ).…”