Pre-competition anxiety in archers: Chen 2010 study

Twenty-four archers described as pre-elite, averaging 19.8 years of age, completed a competitive anxiety questionnaire, the CSAI-2, before three simulated competitions, and were split into two groups by their score, high and low cognitive anxiety. In the two seconds before each arrow was released, brain electrical activity was recorded and read through two indices: frontal midline theta, taken as a marker of attention, and frontal alpha on the left and right, taken as a marker of emotional state.

No difference appears between the groups. Neither theta at Fz (F 0.12, p 0.95) nor alpha at F3 and F4 (F 1.45, p 0.25) separates the high from the low cognitive anxiety archers. The authors offer two explanations, too small a sample or comparable skill between the groups, and conclude that cognitive anxiety most likely acts on performance rather than on cortical activation.

The EEG was cut into the two seconds before release and divided into four windows of half a second each, so as to follow attention and emotion over time rather than reduce them to one number. The bands are theta from 4 to 8 Hz and alpha from 8 to 12 Hz; the dependent variables are theta at Fz and alpha at F3 and F4. The comparisons are a two factor analysis of variance, four windows by two groups, on theta, and a three factor one, four windows by two electrodes by two groups, on alpha, and in both cases it is the interaction between window and group that is reported. The twenty-four archers were organised into twelve groups, and each group competed three times.

This is not a paper. It is a conference abstract, some four hundred words printed in the journal's abstract supplement, and no full version exists. Almost everything needed to judge the result is missing: we do not know the distance, the bow, how many arrows each archer shot, how the simulated competitions were organised, how many archers were in each group, where the cut between high and low anxiety fell, how the moment of release was marked, or how the traces were cleaned of movement artefacts, which in a gesture like shooting a bow are the central problem.

The result is an absence of difference in twenty-four people, and an absence of difference in a sample that size does not separate an effect that is not there from an effect that cannot be seen: the authors acknowledge as much, listing the shortage of participants among their explanations. Performance is in the title and in the stated aims, yet no scores are reported, so the conclusion that cognitive anxiety acts on performance rather than on cortical activation rests on no data in this text. Reading theta as attention and alpha as emotional state is, finally, an assumption carried over from the literature rather than anything the study tests.

For an archer there is nothing to take to the range, beyond a standard for reading the literature on anxiety and the archer's brain. Between two groups of young archers reporting high and low cognitive anxiety, frontal electrical activity in the two seconds before release came out the same. It is a negative result, obtained in a small sample and reported in a text too short to assess: it does not show that anxiety leaves no trace in the brain, nor the opposite.

In the registry it counts for what it is, a conference abstract, and it also serves to keep track of how often this literature rests on one page texts.