ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the characteristics, antecedents, consequences and regulation of anxiety. The Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2) has largely been the instrument of choice for measuring competitive state anxiety. Sport Competition Anxiety Test (SCAT) has historically been used to measure a person's level of trait anxiety in sport. Athletes who exhibit high levels of trait anxiety are more likely to interpret sport situations as threatening compared with their less trait-anxious counterparts. Processing efficiency theory predicts that cognitive anxiety depletes the processing and storage capacity of working memory, effectively diverting attention from task-relevant cues. Attentional control theory represents a development of processing efficiency theory and offers further hypotheses about the impact of anxiety on performance, based largely on the assumption that anxiety impairs the functioning of the central executive. One common technique that may help athletes manage anxiety, used in self-paced sports, is a pre-performance routine (PPR).
