AROUSAL

When stirred to activity, we experience a state of alertness, anticipation, and all-round readiness described as arousal. It is a diffuse pattern of activities, both physiological and cognitive, that prepares us for a task. The word itself is formed from a meaning on, up, or out and rouse, for startle or become active. Processes. Typically, a high level of arousal involves the sympathetic

AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM: Metabolic rates increase, as does respiratory volume; blood vessels constrict, pupils dilate and sweat glands open. ATTENTION narrows and FOCUS sharpens as we approach the task. Whether a person experiences such changes as a desirable part of PSYCHING-up for a task, or a source of ANXIETY, apprehension, or downright FEAR, depends both on the individual and the CONTEXT, as well as the moment-to-moment changes in circumstances. Some activation is needed for any task, whether watching a game

on television or actually playing. Arousal might increase during any sports COMPETITION when a sudden, unexpected event occurs, no matter how minor: a plane passing overhead might arouse a tennis player preparing to serve, or a particularly rowdy fan may raise the arousal level of a football player, or, more seriously, a boxer leading comfortably on points might be knocked down by a speculative shot causing a sharp arousal. All tasks have an optimal level of arousal: the aim of athletes is to

calibrate that level to the vagaries of competition while maintaining COMPOSURE. The precise relationship between arousal and sports performance has occupied psychologists since the 1950s, when drive theory’s equation performance = arousal + skill level held sway. A high level of arousal will assist a performance if the athlete has a high degree of skill; but it will hurt a performance by an athlete without skills. The formula was crude and unreliable and was superseded by others, one of the most influential being the INVERTED-U hypothesis. Explanation 1: Inverted-U. If levels of arousal are imagined as the

horizontal axis of a graph with ‘‘low’’ plotted to the left of ‘‘high’’ and performance plotted along the vertical axis, then we may think of arousal as defining an inverted U-shape. Performance is optimal between low and high and tapers off if either arousal is too low or too high. Several imperturbable athletes consistently operate with arousal levels inside the arc at the top of the inverted U. Other athletes seem to reach that state only occasionally. Boxing, like football and sprinting, is a sport in which powerful

gross motor behavior is crucial, but optimum performance in other sports relies more on fine-motor skills. So, darts and pool players

would probably reach PEAK PERFORMANCE when their arousal levels are at lower levels. Imagine this as the arches of the McDonald’s ‘‘M’’ with the left arch describing the arousal curve of darts, pool and other sport performers who need low arousal levels to hit peaks. Still others need to switch: the precision and fineness of judgment Tiger Woods used when putting probably required only a modest level of arousal; but a drive involved cognitive activity plus muscular activity and almost certainly required a much higher level of arousal. While it has been a primary model for approaching the relation-

ship between arousal and performance, the inverted-U hypothesis, as Shawn Arent and Daniel Landers remind us, ‘‘is simply a descriptive relationship; it is not a theoretical explanation.’’ Arent and Lander’s controlled experiment involving riding bicycle ergometers (apparatus that measures work or energy expended during a period of physical exercise), lent support to the inverted-U, but the authors admit it does not enable an understanding of how and why arousal influences performance. How, for instance, can it explain Jana Novotna’s extraordinary

collapse in the 1993 Wimbledon final? Leading 4-1 in games and 400 up with serve in the final set, Novotna, who had exuded SELFCONFIDENCE up to this point, seemed stricken with anxiety and disintegrated in the face of her opponent Steffi Graf ’s consistency. Novotna’s reputation for CHOKING was boosted two years later in the French Open when she allowed Chanda Rubin to survive nine match points and crashed to defeat. Richard Cox gives a comparable example from the 1996 Masters when Greg Norman surrendered a six-shot lead with one round to go and lost to Nick Faldo (1998). In these instances, results suggest the onset of a catastrophe: performance did not decline smoothly as the athletes, sensing victory, became too aroused; but an abrupt descent-graphically, resembling an inverted-V. Explanation 2: Catastrophe. To explain this, J. Fazey and L. Hardy

argued that, if a competitor is highly physiologically aroused and experiences cognitive-state anxiety, then a sudden and often dramatic deterioration will occur; in other words, a catastrophe. High levels of physiological arousal do not in themselves CAUSE downfalls. Downfalls happen when high levels of physiological arousal are combined with increases in cognitive-state anxiety. The prospect of closing in on a victory can precipitate this kind of anxiety and, once the catastrophe has occurred, small reductions in arousal will do nothing to get the performance back to its former level. As most catastrophes happen toward the end of a competition, it is often too late for the aroused athlete to rescue the situation.