Anxiety and performance

In the world of sport, athletes and their trainers see competitive emotions and, in particular, performance anxiety as one of the most important factors likely to influence the outcome of a sports competition. These emotions attract such vast interest because even today they continue to raise many questions. While positive emotions are generally considered to be largely facilitative to an athlete's performance, the link between negative emotions, and particularly competitive anxiety, and performance seems less unanimous. Some view anxiety as a phenomenon which hampers performance; for them, an anxious athlete is a fragile one. Others view anxiety as a driver and give as examples those athletes who only perform well under the pressure of competition and the anxious state it elicits. There is currently no single model for the relationship between anxiety (or emotions) and performance on which everybody agrees, in spite of the fact that the scientific community has been striving for some time to better understand the links between them. Research carried out to confirm these links has produced inconsistent results which are difficult to interpret as the variables measured (anxiety, emotional states, performance) and the framework of the studies (characteristics of the participants, importance of the sports event) most often differ.