ABSTRACT
Stress is an inherent aspect of sports competition. However, individuals perceive competition differently, with some responding positively to the challenge while others feel debilitated and performance suffers. The relationship between anxiety and sport performance has attracted much attention from researchers over the last 25 years, and to better understand the relationship between stress and performance in sport, the psychological, physiological, and less frequently, biochemical responses have been investigated. Since anxiety is a negative emotional state, characterized by nervousness, worry and apprehension and is associated with activation or arousal of the body, some studies have tended to focus on the potentially negative effects on performance. However, some authors (Jones and Swain, 1992; Woodman and Hardy, 2001) have reported that anxiety can have positive consequences in performance environments. For Cheng et al. (2009), the adaptive nature of anxiety may have been under-represented by the conventional two components of worry and emotionality, and they proposed a more balanced viewpoint to reflect not just the maladaptive but also adaptive aspects of anxiety.
