Performance anxiety and the plasticity of emotional responses

Current psychological theories of performance anxiety focus heavily on relating performers' physiological and mental states to their abilities to maintain focus and execute learned skills. How task-specific expertise and past experiences moderate the degree to which individuals become anxious in a given performance context are not well accounted for within these theories. This review considers how individual differences arising from learning may shape the psychobiological, emotional, and cognitive processes that modulate anxious states associated with the performance of highly trained skills. Current approaches to understanding performance anxiety are presented, followed by a critique of these approaches. A connectionist model is proposed as an alternative approach to characterising performance anxiety by viewing performers' anxious states at a specific time point as jointly determined by experience-dependent plasticity, competition between motivational systems, and ongoing cognitive and somatic states. Clarifying how experience-dependent plasticity contributes to the emergence of socio-evaluative anxiety in challenging situations can not only help performers avoid developing maladaptive emotional responses, but may also provide new clues about how memories of past events and imagined future states interact with motivational processes to drive changes in emotional states and cognitive processing.