Personality of archers and racers: Cohen 2018

The study compares the personality of drag racers, taken as an example of an extreme sport, with that of archers, taken as an example of a traditional one: 144 drivers (108 men and 36 women) and 45 archers (30 men and 15 women), split into professionals and amateurs. All completed two classic questionnaires, one on extraversion and neuroticism and one on sensation seeking with its four components: thrill and adventure seeking, experience seeking, disinhibition and susceptibility to boredom.

Drivers and archers did not differ on extraversion or neuroticism. Neuroticism was, however, lower in professionals than in amateurs, in both sports. The drivers scored higher than the archers on overall sensation seeking, on thrill seeking and on disinhibition, with small effects (partial eta squared around 0.02). Among the archers the men sought thrills more than the women: for instance 7.16 against 4.50 among the professionals; among the drivers there was no such difference. The authors conclude that sensation seeking separates extreme from traditional sports and that those managing rehabilitation after injury should take it into account.

The instruments are the Eysenck Personality Inventory, 24 yes-or-no items for extraversion and 24 for neuroticism, and the fifth version of Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale. The drivers were recruited through a specialist website and at race meetings, the archers through clubs and archery websites; the questionnaires were completed online or on paper, and the archers filled them in either online or in a quiet area of the club. For drivers, professional means a licensed driver in the professional classes, paid for top placings; for archers it means someone competing at national or international level, while amateurs are club members who compete regularly.

The archers were older on average than the drivers (36 for the men and 38.2 for the women, against about 30 to 31 for the drivers). The analysis is a three-way analysis of variance (sport, level and sex) with age as a covariate, repeated for each scale.

There are 45 archers, and the paper does not say how many were professionals and how many amateurs within each sex: some cells look very small, such as the professional women, with unusually low standard deviations. The archers' discipline, country and exact level are not given. "Professional" means different things in the two sports, so the comparison by level mixes criteria that do not match. The questionnaires are self-report, and the authors note that extreme sport participants may overstate their appetite for risk.

The study collects no data on injury or rehabilitation: the implications for recovery in the title come from the literature cited, not from the results. The differences found are small and many tests were run on the same data without correction. In the section on overall sensation seeking, the follow-up analysis reports the same test (t = 2.3, p 0.026) already given for thrill seeking, and it is unclear whether it is a separate result or a repetition.

For anyone who shoots, the study confirms a common picture without adding much: archers, on average, seek strong sensations less than drag racers, and higher-level archers score slightly lower on neuroticism, a lower tendency to anxiety, than amateurs, as the literature the authors cite reports for many sports. It does not say whether these traits help people shoot better, whether they can change, or how an archer behaves after an injury. The difference between men and women in thrill seeking concerns a group of 45 people and should be treated with caution.