Anxiety–performance relationships in climbing: a process-oriented approach
Section snippets
Participants
Thirteen participants, five male and eight female, aged 20 to 30 years, volunteered to participate in the experiment. The participants, mainly college students, had no experience in climbing, and were naive to the purposes of the experiment. They were paid a small fee for their participation.
As a standard check, the Dutch version of the A-Trait scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)4
Experiment 2
A possible explanation for performance decrements coinciding with anxiety may be a regress to earlier stages of motor learning (e.g., Baumeister, 1984, Fitts and Posner, 1967, Hardy, 1999, Masters, 1992, Masters, 2000, Mullen and Hardy, 2000) characterised by higher muscle tension, and rigid and jerky movements. In Experiment 1 we showed that anxiety is accompanied by more muscle fatigue, indicating a higher muscle tension. In Experiment 2 we examined whether anxiety is also accompanied by
General discussion
The main aim of this study was to examine the relationship between anxiety and motor performance. More specifically, we investigated the processes underlying the often-noticed impairment of performance associated with anxiety. To examine anxiety–performance relationships we investigated possible manifestations of anxiety at three levels: the level of subjective experience, the physiological level, and the behavioural level. Based on the literature on anxiety (e.g., Hardy, 1999, Masters, 1992,
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our gratitude to Mark Arts, Arjan Berdien, Charlotte Gardeniers, and Walter de Kok for conducting Experiment 2.
We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
We thank Peter Beek for his valuable input regarding the dynamical perspective on dimensionality and the concept of degrees of freedom.
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