Anxiety and arousal are sometimes talked about in the media, talk about athletes being pumped up or being up for the game or psyching themselves up. The idea is that it's possible too up, in other words to be too excited and have your levels and anxiety and arousal be so high that you cannot perform under pressure. Let's get some definitions first, first of all arousal refers to an all-inclusive well ranging continuum of psychological activation. Arousal is neither a positive or negative thing in terms of your performance and it is not the same thing is as anxiety some physiological measures of arousal include in increase in heart rates, an increase an respiration rate, sweating, and some other physical characteristics that may be measured in a exercise physiology lab. Some emotional measures if you're feeling positively you may feel excited or happy if you're feeling negatively you may feel fear or embarrassment. Anxiety does have a negative connotation it is a negatively charged emotional state characterized by internal discomfort and a feeling of nervousness. So arousal and anxiety sometimes do go hand-in-hand but just because someone is aroused doesn't mean they're anxious but if someone is anxious they are definitely aroused. There are different types of anxiety, state anxiety is a temporary form of apprehension that varies in intensity and it's relative to the strength of the fear-eliciting cue. So its state anxiety, it's a state that you're in it's not something that's permanent that's with you all the time. Cognitive state anxiety is characterized by worry and emotional distress it causes performance to deteriorate this is where negative concerns about performance it's where you have negative concerns about performance and other unpleasant feelings. Somatic state anxiety is where you are physiologically, it’s physiologically based so someone may have a rapid heart rate, clammy hands, and upset stomach, sweating etc. Some of the neuro physiological mechanisms related to anxiety and arousal, the autonomic nervous system is in control of the involuntary actions of the heart rate, respiration, sweating, and blood pressure. So those things are out of our conscious control or that's at least how we usually talk about them. The electrical properties of the skin or something else that can be measured, your heart rate and then EMGs or electromyography can measure muscle tension you're more likely to hold your muscles tense if you are anxious. And then the release of certain hormones, epinephrine which is adrenalin, norepinephrine, and cortisol these things serve not only as energy providers that they also act as painkillers. Performance and State anxiety we can measure State anxiety by using what's called a competitive state anxiety inventory two of the CSAII the idea is that as cognitive state anxiety increases, performance levels decrease and even a little is bad. However somatic state anxiety is good to a point if you listen to what I just said over the last five slides I talked about arousal as being very related to physiology and somatic state anxiety also being physiological. Arousal and somatic state anxiety are sometimes used interchangeably. What you see on this slide is the graph representing what was described on the last slide what you see is that if performance is high it's likely that cognitive state anxiety is low, and as cognitive state anxiety goes from a state of a low to high that's the pink line moving to the right and your performance gets worse. However what you see with somatic state anxiety is that it's good to a point if SSA is very low your performance is likely to be low but somewhere between low and high your performance is very good what that tells you is there seems to be an optimal level of somatic state anxiety and if you go above or below that level and your performance decreases. This might look familiar to some of you and it is it's what's called the Inverted-U hypothesis it is talking about arousal though there's an optimal level of arousal for every behavior values above and below that are likely to create a poor performance. Many times pre-competition hype is used to get athletes up or to increase arousal, to little arousal the athletes won't reach optimal levels or to little pre- competition hype they won't reach their optimal level of arousal that's going to result in the best performance, but if they're too aroused then it can be detrimental to their performance. The trick is figuring out how much arousal is right for each individual and letting each individual achieve that. So here's another picture of that upside down u-shape, the pink line that is like an upside down u is arousal with arousal from low to high on the x-axis and performance from low to high on the y-axis. We see the best performance is somewhere between low and high arousal. For optimal arousal levels it's going to be different for every sport in every individual, individual characteristics of each sport are going to dictate the optimal level of arousal in other words the best performance. For something like golf that's a fine motor skill you need to have low arousal you don't see golfers you know jumping up and down and getting their heart rate and her blood pressure real high because they have to perform skills that require fine motor skill. However in a sport like powerlifting higher levels of arousal will actually help again, not too high but higher relatively compared to golf. If you look at some different sports you can replace the descriptions here with many different types of sports skills but for something like kicking a field goal you certainly do need some precision and unless it's an extremely long field goal you may not need to exert maximum force that can be done at a relatively low level of arousal. We're blocking in volleyball you still need some precision but a little more arousal is okay you have to jump pretty high, blocking in football someone could perform with even more arousal, and a clean and jerk and weight training or weight lifting you need to have your arousal be fairly high in order to achieve a good lift. Another thing that's related to arousal and performance is skill level, optimal arousal levels for individuals with lower skill levels will fall within a lower range if I'm a beginning basketball player I'm not going to be able to handle really high levels of arousal but someone who's in the NBA could. Things that can affect your arousal could be crowd noise, pressure, stress, nervousness it's the end of a game and this is a clutch play and I need to make it happen that NBA player is going to do a lot better than I am. Highly skilled athletes are able to utilize higher levels of arousal to channel attention and contribute positively to the task. So here we have a graph of what I just discussed this is the Yerkes-Dodson's thoughts an idea of the inverted-U and what we see is arousal again on the x-axis and performance on the y-axis. A beginning athlete not only is going to have worst performances overall that's the pink upside down U, but they're also going to be able to perform at lower levels of arousal. Intermediate skill level they're going to perform better as you see by the height of the green upside down U and their arousal levels are going to be higher than beginners and lower than advanced. For that advanced performer they're going to have a very high level of performance when their arousal is quite high, much higher than the beginning or the intermediate performers. What I want to do is give you some more information that is not on this slideshow so just listen and take notes for a few minutes. The idea of pressure and stress let me give you a few definitions, pressure is the influence of high incentives for success pressure as the influence of high incentives for success and the stress or the stress response is the body's response to bring about energy. Okay in other words an increase in hormones, blood pressure, and heart rates these help you get ready for action either to run away flights or to do something fight. When someone is put in a stressful situation or their level of arousal or stress is high they are likely to perform what's called a dominant response. The dominant response is the natural reaction, okay under low levels of arousal an athlete can choose from a variety of responses but under high levels of arousal or high levels of stress what's going to happen is the athlete is going to do the thing that comes most naturally. For a basketball player that may be a layup if that's the thing they've practiced the most that's going to be the dominant response. There are two types of tasks a simple task, is a task that is well practiced well practiced and it requires little thought the person has practiced this task over and over again so it would be likely that a simple task would be their dominant response. Alright a complex task, is something that they have not practiced a lot and so they're going to have to think about it a little more, they need a little bit more attention okay this is not likely to be their dominant response. So think about it as the arousal goes up the attention or the attentional capacity that this person has available to allocate is very low so they're going to have to pick something that doesn't take much thought, that doesn't take much attention. Therefore they're going to choose the simple task and they're not even going to think about it, they're just going to do it because it comes naturally and that's called the dominant response.