ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the relationship between emotion and perception, and discusses implications for anticipation and superior performance in sport. It examines key constructs and draws on established conceptual frameworks and empirical evidence from interdisciplinary fields of study, including psychology, neuroscience, kinesiology, and biomechanics. The chapter highlights avenues for future research, provides implications for training athletes to self-regulate their emotions, and describes ways to develop more resilient attentional control behaviour within stressful environments. Emotions like anxiety reduce the efficiency of visual search behaviours, in part because individuals prioritise emotion-focussed coping over tactical priorities. Emotion-elicited performance problems can be addressed and ameliorated by helping athletes become better regulators of their emotions. In addition to interventions directed towards regulating emotional reactions, an alternative/complementary strategy is to train optimal attentional and perceptual skills to limit the influence of emotional reactivity on performance. Emotional responses fluctuate based on an individual’s expertise in a given domain, including past exposure to similar stress-inducing situations.
