Effects of anxiety on handgun shooting behavior of police officers: a pilot study

Abstract

The current pilot study aimed at providing an initial assessment of how anxiety influences police officers' shooting behavior. Seven police officers participated and completed an identical shooting exercise under two experimental conditions: low anxiety, against a non-threatening opponent, and high anxiety (HA), against a threatening opponent who occasionally shot back using colored soap cartridges. Measurements included shooting accuracy, movement times, head/body orientation, and blink behavior. Results showed that under HA, shooting accuracy decreased. Underlying this degradation of performance, participants acted faster and made themselves smaller to reduce the chance of being hit. Furthermore, they blinked more often, leading to increases in the amount of time participants had their eyes closed. Findings provide support for attentional control theory, hereby also pointing to possible interventions to improve police officers' shooting performance under pressure.

Effects of anxiety on running with and without an aiming task

“…The Effects of anxiety on running and aiming 13 anxiety scale, also called the ''anxiety thermometer'', was validated by Houtman and Bakker (1989) and has been successfully used previously (e.g. Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2010). Each individual was provided with a new scale after each condition.…”

“…Much research on attentional control theory is concerned with cognitive tasks, as these often rely heavily on working memory. However, findings that support attentional control theory are available for perceptual-motor aiming tasks such as penalty kicks (Wilson et al, 2009b), skeet (Causer, Holmes, Smith, & Williams, 2011), handgun (Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2010), and basketball shooting (Wilson, Vine, & Wood, 2009a). Yet, many of the sports in which aiming tasks are important, such as soccer, basketball, and handball, also contain a large aerobic component; that is, many of these tasks are combined or interchanged with physical exertion often in the form of running.…”

Effects of Threat on Police Officers' Shooting Behavior: Anxiety, Action Specificity, and Affective Influences on Perception

“…To analyze the effect of our threat manipulation (dummy knife [LT] versus electrical knife [HT]), we assessed the participants' subjective ratings of anxiety on a scale of 0 to 10 by using a visual-analogue scale called the 'anxiety thermometer' (Houtman & Bakker, 1989; see also Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2010Nieuwenhuys et al, in press). Furthermore, we performed a 'beat-to-beat' analysis of the participants' heart rate by using a Polar heart rate monitor (s810; Polar Electro Oy, Kempele, Finland).…”

“…If high threat would indeed lead to more anxiety, based on previous work, we predicted that this would result in earlier shooting (e.g. Corell et al, 2002;Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2010Nieuwenhuys et al, in press;Payne, 2001). We reasoned that if this effect would be due to affective influences on perception (Clerkin et al, 2009;Teachman et al, 2008; see also Proffitt, 2006aProffitt, , 2006b, then this should be reflected by increased underestimations of the actual shooting distance under high threat.…”

“…Furthermore, to manipulate response mode, we divided participants into two groups: one group that actually shot the suspect (by means of colored-soap cartridges; e.g. Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2010 and one group that provided a verbal indication of their shot. Directly after shooting, perceived shooting distance was assessed through visual matching (e.g.…”