Competition anxiety and saliva in archers: Lim 2016

Nineteen women's college archers, competing at 30 metres in the 34th Korean President's Cup in July 2016, reported how anxious they felt and gave three saliva samples over the same morning. Anxiety, on a 1 to 10 scale, stood at 5.89 ten minutes before the competition, 8.15 one minute before and 6.76 ten minutes after the end (F 7.05, p < 0.05): the two higher values are the one close to the shooting and the one after it, while ten minutes beforehand anxiety was lower. Salivary alpha-amylase follows the same pattern: 43.80 units per millilitre ten minutes before, 87.40 one minute before and 78.20 ten minutes after (F 4.30, p < 0.05).

The score was the total of 36 arrows, six ends of six, with a maximum of 360. The group mean was 349.20, and individual scores ran from 341 to 355: fourteen points between first and last.

Within that narrow band the three measures move together. Anxiety and amylase correlate positively (0.62), while both correlate negatively with the score: amylase and score at minus 0.87, anxiety and score at minus 0.84, all at p < 0.01. Those who reported more anxiety that morning had more amylase in their saliva and shot fewer points. What remains is an association measured at a single competition, not a chain of causes.

The measurements were taken at the competition, not in a laboratory. The archers were on average 22.12 years old, each with more than ten years of practice, on no medication and with no illness, in particular no inflammation or disease of the mouth, which would alter the saliva.

Anxiety was collected with a single question on a Likert scale from 1 (not at all) to 10 (extremely anxious), drawn from Beck's anxiety inventory, at three moments: ten minutes before the competition, one minute before, and ten minutes after the end. For saliva the archers had to go at least an hour without eating, rinsed their mouths ten minutes before collection, then chewed an absorbent swab; the samples went into tubes and into the refrigerator. Alpha-amylase was assayed by ELISA on a VersaMax microplate reader.

The score is the official competition score, 36 arrows at 30 metres. The analysis, run in SPSS 23, compares the three moments with a repeated-measures analysis of variance and relates anxiety, amylase and score through Pearson correlations. In the text the three saliva collections are described once as ten minutes before, three minutes before and ten minutes after, while the figures and tables call them ten minutes before, one minute before and ten minutes after; the discussion in turn uses the three-minute wording.

The group is small and particular: nineteen women, all from Korean colleges, all with more than ten years of shooting, measured at a single competition on a single morning. Their scores lie between 341 and 355 out of 360, so the correlation of minus 0.87 rests on differences of a few points, where the wind on the day also counts.

Anxiety is a single answer on a 1 to 10 scale, not a validated questionnaire, and the third reading comes ten minutes after the end, when every archer already knows what she has scored: what she reports at that point may be a reaction to the result. A correlation, besides, says nothing about which way things move, and the study has no comparison group and no manipulated condition.

Salivary alpha-amylase also moves with food, with how much saliva is produced, with the time of day and with chewing: fasting and rinsing were controlled here, the rest was not. The paper sets the threshold at p of 0.05 or less with no correction for multiple comparisons, and the comparisons are many. The contrast between high scorers and middle scorers, mentioned twice in the discussion, appears nowhere in the results with any figures attached.

The description of the participants contains an obvious error: mean body weight is given as 162.07 kilograms alongside a mean height of 167.40 centimetres. In the published title, finally, the word records is printed as Eecords.

For an archer this is the portrait of one competition morning, not a lever to pull. The archers who scored lower that day had reported more anxiety and had more amylase in their saliva. The study does not show that lowering anxiety raises the score, and it does not show that measuring your own saliva would tell you anything useful about your shooting.

What remains is the shape of the day. Anxiety and amylase peaked one minute before shooting, not ten minutes before, and were still high ten minutes after the end: the tension does not switch off with the last arrow. That is an observation on nineteen archers at one competition, and the rest, including any place saliva measurements might have in preparation, stays outside this study.