The present study examined how the level of trait anxiety, which is a personality characteristic, influences state anxiety and penalty shoot-out performance under pressure by instruction. The high and low trait anxiety groups were selected by using Spielberger's Trait Anxiety Scale, with trait anxiety scores, and control and pressure conditions manipulated by instructions. The participants were two groups of eight university male soccer players. They individually performed 20 shots from the penalty shoot-out point, aiming at the top right and top left corner areas in the soccer goal. Each condition had 10 trials in a within-subject design. The dependent measures comprised the number of successful goals and the state anxiety scores under each instructional condition. The result showed a significant main effect of instruction. State anxiety scores increased more and the number of successful goals decreased more in high trait anxiety groups than in low trait anxiety groups under pressure instructional condition. These findings suggest that players with higher trait anxiety scores tend to experience increased state anxiety under a pressure-laden condition, and higher state anxiety interferes with goal performance.
The first purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between the intensity (i.e., level) and direction (i.e., debilitative/facilitative) of state anxiety in predicting a serial addition task performance. Participants rated the degree to which the intensity of each anxiety symptom was either debilitative or facilitative to subsequent performance. The second purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of the intensity and direction of trait anxiety on the intensity and direction of state anxiety. A total of 502 undergraduate students (170 females, 332 males) completed the State Trait Anxiety Inventory, the modified Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2, and each direction scale prior to the task. Performance measures comprised of computational speed, percentage of correct answers, and percentage of correct counted numbers of beep tones. Participants were divided into high/low and debilitative/facilitative groups, based on their intensity and direction scores of trait anxiety. Four groups were created; high-debilitative (n = 256), high-facilitative (n = 93), low-debilitative (n = 31), and low-facilitative (n = 63). The intensity of trait anxiety, state anxiety, cognitive anxiety, and somatic anxiety showed negative linear correlations with each direction of these anxieties. The intensity of self-confidence was negatively correlated with the intensity of trait and state anxieties, whereas, it was positively related to the direction of these anxieties. Unlike previous studies using sport performance, the present cognitive computational task performance measures did not reveal significant relationships with the intensity and direction of these anxieties and self-confidence. Furthermore, there were individual differences in the intensity and direction of trait anxiety, and both the intensity and direction of trait anxiety influenced the intensity and direction of state anxiety separately. These findings systematically replicate previous studies with regard to the significant relationships between the self-report measures of the intensity and direction of trait anxiety, state anxiety, cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and self-confidence. Future studies should use another cognitive task with a higher level of difficulty to test the utility of the intensity and direction model of trait and state anxieties in a non-sport performance context.
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