Arousal and anxiety.
Arousal and anxiety are terms that are related to stress. Arousal is seen as being a positive aspect and shows how motivated a person is by a certain situations. The more aroused a person is the more excited he will be. An example of this can be found in football, when we watch a match involving two teams that we don?t support, we are interested but our attention wanders and we do not get too excited by the result. However when we watch a team that we support we are engrossed in the action to the point of where we don?t hear noises around us and time seems to go very quickly.
Anxiety is a negative aspect of stress. It is characterised by nervousness, worry and apprehension.
Arousal and performance
Arousal levels will have an influence on performance, but it is not always clear cut what this relationship is. As a way to examine the effects of arousal and anxiety, we performed a practical experiment. In this experiment the class played curling. The object was to get the disc as close as possible to the target . There were three different areas near the target.
The area closest to the target was worth 6 points and the area furthest away was worth 2. Failure to reach any of the areas would result in no points. W played the game under three different conditions, the first condition was with no audience , the second was with a passive audience and the third was with an audience interacting. The table below shows the results
No audience Passive audience Interacting audience
Name Rest heart rate Heart rate Score Heart rate Score Heart rate Score
Ting ting 77 86 16 86 20 98 24
Dave 78 87 24 91 12 101 8
Henry 64 70 16 75 16 87 16
Scott 59 77 8 85 24 93 16
Steve 61 81 18 96 24 111 8
lei 84 96 14 102 14 108 18
These results show how certain individuals perform under pressure.
Ting ting performed better under increased pressure. This indicates that the stress caused by spectators provided her with arousal. This allowed her to focus fully on the task and helped her block out other stimuli such as the sound of the crowd.
Dave however performed very well with no audience but buckled under the pressure of an audience. This indicates that spectators caused Dave to feel anxious and therefore he could not concentrate fully on the task at hand.
Scott performed poorly with no audience, very well with a passive audience but his performance dropped when the audience got mor rowdy. This indicates that scott performs better when aroused, however too much arousal can hamper his perform,ance.
Steve followed a similar pattern, he performed well with no audience, brilliantly with a passive audience but poorly with an interacting audience. This again shows that the arousal at first had a possitive effect on his performance, however when the arousal increased so did anxiety which led to a poor performance in front of a interacting audience.
Henry?s performance seemed to be unaffected by either type of audience. This indicates that he was not feeling aroused by the activity and therefore did not receive any positive or negative effects.
Lei performed the same with no audience and with a passive audience, however her performance improved with an interacting audience. This indicates that it took a greater amount of stress to get her aroused. The following theories will help to explain the results.
Drive Theory
This theory states that as arousal levels rise, so do performance leveld. This happnes in linear fashion and can be described as a straight line. The actual performance also depends on the arousal level and the skill level of the performer. Arousal will exagerate the individuals dominant response, meaning that if they have learnt the skill well their dominant response will be exaggerated positively, but if they are a novice, their skill level will drop to to produce a worst performance. This theory is simplistic as it does not take into account the type of task performed. It might work for a strength related task such as weight lifting or performing press ups, but for more complex tasks, such as playing snooker or throwing darts, it may not apply as the arousal levls may damage performance.
The Inverted U hypothesis
This theory agrees that arousal improves performance, but only up to a certain point, and once arousal goes beyond this point performance starts to decline
This theorys main point is that there is an optimum level of arousal before performance starts to dimidh. This is also called the ideal performing state and is often refered to as the ?ZONE? At this point the arousal level meets the demands of the task, and everything feels good and is going well.
Catastrophe theory
This theory has been take a step further by hardy and fazey(1988), who agree with the inverted U hypothesis, but they say that once arousal level has passed the IPS will drop off drastically, rather than steadily. The point where performance drops is called the point of catastrophe. The americans refer to this phenomenon, when performance drops as ? choking? and the history of sport is littered with examples of when people or teams have thrown away seemingly unassailable positions.
A classic example was in the British open golf championships of 99 when john van de velde went to the 72nd hole of the tournament with a three shot lead. All he had to do was hit the ball straight on to the fairway and then he would have five shots to putt the ball. However he went for glory and sliced his drive in to the rough, then chipped in to the brook and had to take his shoes off top play the next shot. He eventually got down for a seven, which led to a three way play off. This he lost to paul lauwrie.
