Coping Under Pressure: Employing Emotion Regulation Strategies to Enhance
Performance Under Pressure.
Reappraisal and distraction were effective emotion regulation strategies in helping people to cope
instead of choke under pressure. The findings suggest that interventions that aim to prevent choking
under pressure could benefit from including emotion regulation strategies.
When a person chokes, they fail “to perform up to whatever level of skill and ability the person has at
the time”. This is especially true for highly practiced performances, such as free throws, which over
many years of practice have become highly automatic.
Baumeister and Showers (1986) identified two groups of theories that can explain the choking under
pressure phenomenon:
- attentional theories: describe how pressure changes the attentional mechanisms and memory
structures supporting performance.
- drive theories: state that performance depends on the level of arousal and specifically that an
optimum level of arousal benefits performance.
Most strategies that have been proposed to alleviate choking in sports are derived from these
attentional theories and focus on adapting individuals to the types of attentional monitoring that are
thought to be prompted by pressure situations.
The effectiveness of two different strategies in regulating arousal will be compared:
- cognitive reappraisal: reinterpreting the emotion-invoking stimulus in a way that alters its
emotional impact.
- distraction: engaging in another neutral thought.
Performance Under Pressure.
Reappraisal and distraction were effective emotion regulation strategies in helping people to cope
instead of choke under pressure. The findings suggest that interventions that aim to prevent choking
under pressure could benefit from including emotion regulation strategies.
When a person chokes, they fail “to perform up to whatever level of skill and ability the person has at
the time”. This is especially true for highly practiced performances, such as free throws, which over
many years of practice have become highly automatic.
Baumeister and Showers (1986) identified two groups of theories that can explain the choking under
pressure phenomenon:
- attentional theories: describe how pressure changes the attentional mechanisms and memory
structures supporting performance.
- drive theories: state that performance depends on the level of arousal and specifically that an
optimum level of arousal benefits performance.
Most strategies that have been proposed to alleviate choking in sports are derived from these
attentional theories and focus on adapting individuals to the types of attentional monitoring that are
thought to be prompted by pressure situations.
The effectiveness of two different strategies in regulating arousal will be compared:
- cognitive reappraisal: reinterpreting the emotion-invoking stimulus in a way that alters its
emotional impact.
- distraction: engaging in another neutral thought.
