6 Athletes are emotional, too In achievement contexts, considerable demands are placed on an individual who has the potential to challenge their ability to cope and evoke a substantial emotional response. Sport is an excellent example of such a context. Theories of motivation in sport often cite positive affect – a positive emotional state – as both an adaptive outcome of sport participation and a source of information for future motivation to engage in the sport. However, the competitive nature of sport also has the ability to evoke more negative or maladaptive affective or emotional states.
Sport, especially at the elite level, exerts considerable stress on the athlete or performer. This is because at the highest level of performance the stakes are very high; for example, professional sports performers depend on success to earn their salary, prize monies, and win bonuses, as well as attain intrinsic rewards such as personal satisfaction and self-esteem, rewards and outcomes common to competitive athletes at all levels of sport. If there is a mismatch between the demands placed on an athlete or sport performer by their environment and their ability to cope with the concomitant emotive states that arise from that demand, then it may interfere with their ability to perform what Zajonc (1965) called the ‘dominant response’, i. the well practised or trained movements and skills involved in sport performance.
This can often, catastrophically, manifest itself in sometimes embarrassingly poor performances relative to performances in practice and training, even among the most highly skilled athletes. This is a phenomenon often referred to as ‘choking’ (Baumeister 1984). Many of us can think of occasions when this has happened in elite sport. Think of France’s soccer team, the reigning World and European Champions and tournament favourites at the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan, leaving the championship after the first round in disgrace after an abysmal series of per- formances in which they failed to win a match or score a goal.
Think of Jean van der Velde’s slump in the 1999 British Open golf championship when he triple bogeyed the last hole after leading by five shots into the last. He needed only a six to win, and he took seven in what is acknowledged as one of the Athletes are emotional, too 131 greatest ‘chokes’ of all time. There are other examples, Martina Hingis resort- ing to serving underarm against Steffi Graf in the 2000 French Open tennis final after being unable to get any serve in and John Aldridge’s penalty miss that handed the English FA cup to Wimbledon in 1988. Why should these acknowledged champions fail to perform to anywhere near the high standards they and others expect of them in high pressure situations? Anxiety, the set of negative affective states associated with an inability to cope with stress placed on an individual by environmental demands, is often the culprit.
Elite and professional athletes are schooled in the negative effects of anxiety and so- called ‘negative’ emotional states on sport performance and many athletes seek the help of sport psychologists for assistance with anxiety control. Indeed, the majority of sport psychology consultations involve anxiety management (Crocker et al. This chapter aims to evaluate social psychological research into the role of emotion in sport and describe the relationships between emotional states, psychological constructs, and sports performance. Why social psychological approaches to emotion and anxiety? On the surface, research in cognition and emotion may not seem entirely relevant to social psychological investigations into sport performance.
How- ever, an examination of the components of social cognitive theories will stand as testament to the importance of emotion constructs in social psychology. For example, as we saw in Chapter 2, affect has been shown to be an integral component of the attitude construct in extensions of the theory of planned behaviour (Hagger and Chatzisarantis, in press). Moreover, while models of social cognition acknowledge that social information from the environment (stimuli) and learnt personal belief systems are processed and serve as a basis for motives, decisions, intentions, and behavioural responses, this does not happen in a vacuum, devoid of feeling states or emotions (Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Perugini and Conner 2000). Emotions can also operate as response or outcome states as well as sources of information for attributions, judgements, beliefs, expectations, desires, intentions, and other social cognitive constructs.
Therefore, the study of social cognition and emotion in applied settings such as sport is necessary, given the clearly complementary nature of these con- structs, in order to explain the complex set of behavioural responses observed in intense emotive sport situations, such as ‘choking’. Defining affect, emotion, anxiety, arousal, and mood Before embarking on a discussion of the role of emotions in social psycho- logical research applied to sport performance, a prerequisite step is to define emotion and emotion-related terms such as affect, emotion, arousal, mood, 132 Athletes are emotional, too and anxiety. These terms are often used in a non-systematic manner and inter- changeably making the interpretation and the exact nature of the explan- ations offered by social psychological approaches of the role of affect-related constructs in sports performance difficult. That stated, full agreement among researchers in social cognition and emotion as to the distinction between affect, emotion, and emotion-related terms is lacking and researchers state that formal working definitions of these terms may be unclear due to substan- tial overlaps between the concepts (Smith et al.
Therefore, any def- initions of affect-related concepts must indicate the boundaries, limitations, and potential confounds. Affect is a general or ‘umbrella’ term that encompasses all ‘mental feeling processes’ (Bagozzi et al. 2002: 37), and therefore can account for the ‘felt’ aspects of emotion as well as the directive and motivational aspects, such as the case of affective attitudes. A number of authors have suggested that affect reflects ‘valenced feeling states’, a term that implies both directionality and a number of specific emotion-related terms such as emotion and mood.
There- fore, emotion and mood can be considered as specific types of affective states with anger, anxiety, guilt, and shame being specific examples of these emotion types. Formal definitions of emotion usually incorporate not only feeling states, but also make reference to a ‘mental state or readiness’ arising from cognitive interpretation of psychological and physiological states such as heightened arousal (Smith et al. Furthermore, emotions are considered to have direction towards a given object, person, or behaviour, much like attitudes, particularly according to appraisal theorists (Smith et al. In addition, emotion can also be described as having a behavioural or response function in that it affects behaviour, such as facial expression of emotion and cognitive and behavioural means to cope with the emotion (Bagozzi et al.
Emo- tions therefore have ‘action tendencies’. A vast array of emotions have been identified in the social psychology literature, but ethological and cross-cultural psychology research has identified six basic or core emotions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and disgust (Ekman 1992). However, as we shall see later, although not considered a core emotion, anxiety is recognized as an important emotion in sport. Mood is, by convention, considered different from emotion as it usually com- prises a profile of different affective states, is less intense, more prolonged, and with no action tendency.
Mood is therefore less transient than emotion and does not usually arise from the appraisal of specific events. However, the bound- ary is sometimes less clear and both mood and specific emotions have been implicated in sports performance. Indeed, some theorists claim that temporal stability as a defining property of mood with respect to emotion is not valid given moods and emotions can be both transient and prolonged (Frijda 1994). Despite this lack of a clear distinction, mood is generally considered by emotion theorists as different from emotion in its reduced ability to produce an action tendency, its lower intensity, and its prolonged rather than transient nature.
Athletes are emotional, too 133 Defining anxiety and arousal More than any other single emotion, anxiety has been the focus of the vast majority of research on emotion and social cognition in sports performance (Gould et al. Anxiety is a specific emotion that has been described as an unpleasant feeling of apprehension and distress, and is usually accompanied by unpleasant physiological responses (Martens et al. Sensations such as ‘sweaty palms’ (also known as ‘galvanic skin response’) and ‘butterflies in the stomach’ (this may be the result of the shunting of blood from the stom- ach due to the effect of catecholamines) are common physiological or ‘som- atic’ symptoms of anxiety. Anxious athletes report these symptoms as well as thoughts of negative performance expectations, a fear of failure, and inability to concentrate (Jones and Hardy 1990).
Modern theorists make the distinction between state and trait anxiety. It follows that anxiety can be both a tendency to respond with anxious symptoms in situations evaluated as being competi- tive (trait-like) and a psychological state determined by environmental factors such as competition and audience presence, as well as intrapersonal variables such as the appraisal of the event as being important (state-like). In either case, appraisal and cognitive-motivational-relational theories of emotion propose that anxiety is a specific emotion with a specific pathology and characterizing features. Theorists also make the distinction between anxiety and arousal.
Anxiety is classed as having a somatic component (symptoms experienced physically e. ‘sweaty palms’, ‘butterflies in stomach’) and a cognitive component (symp- toms felt psychologically e. ‘worry’, ‘inability to concentrate’) (Martens et al. Somatic anxiety is concurrent with some forms of physiological arousal caused by changes in the sympathetic nervous system, and cognitive anxiety is linked to the somatic form through the interpretive system that gives rise to that heightened state of arousal.
Of course, arousal itself is not anxiety, but it is implicated in the anxiety process (Bagozzi et al. Somatic anxiety, for example, is not physiological arousal but a person’s awareness of the symptoms of arousal. Arousal is often considered a heightened state of activation in a person’s physiological and psychological state. It is defined as a unidimen- sional, ‘motivational construct’ (Landers 1980) and can be considered to oper- ate on a continuum from very deep sleep to extreme excitement.
Arousal is mani- fested physiologically through changes in the autonomic nervous system and hormones in the bloodstream that give rise to elevated heart rate, blood pressure, perspiration rate, and muscle tension. A state of anxiety is often accompanied by increased arousal, and, according to appraisal and cognitive- motivational-relational theories of emotion, it is the interpretation of the arousal that gives rise to specific emotions. Importantly, arousal is an intra- personal variable that is likely to give rise to anxiety, but not all aroused individuals become anxious, and the pathology of the arousal is such that it may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for an anxiety response. Arousal may therefore not always be accompanied by an anxiety response, 134 Athletes are emotional, too and early psychophysiology research showed that the interpretation of the arousal could give rise to different interpretations of the accompanying emotions (e.
Schacter and Singer 1962). Recent appraisal theorists believe that arousal is implicated in emotional responses such as anxiety, but there are specific patterns of emotional responses according to the way in which the arousing situation is appraised. Trait versus state distinction Early research with measures of anxiety considered only the trait aspect of anxiety. Anxiety was viewed as a stable facet of personality and therefore con- sidered trait-like in nature.
In this view, anxiety was not directly like personal- ity in the strictest sense because anxiety tendencies were considered to have both an innate and learnt component. Early researchers such as Sarason et al. (1960) produced scales that tapped anxiety as a general disposition that determined anxiety responses in a variety of situations. It was thought that individuals would exhibit characteristic behavioural patterns according to their levels of trait anxiety (see Frijda 1994).
