Anxiety and cortisol in Korean archers: Lim 2018

At the Korean national team trials of 14 July 2018, over 50 metres, the author took the nine archers who finished between first and tenth place and the nine who finished between twentieth and thirtieth, and compared anxiety, salivary amylase and salivary cortisol across the day. The first group finished on 339.5 points out of 360 on average (scores from 335 to 347), the second on 323.3 (from 319 to 328), a clear difference (t 8.95, p < 0.001).

Reported anxiety, on a 1 to 10 scale, was higher in the low-scoring group at all three moments: thirty minutes before, 4.66 against 3.33; three minutes before, 6.14 against 4.88; thirty minutes after the end, 4.52 against 2.74 (F 97.1, p < 0.001). The high-scoring group drops after the competition below its own starting value, the other stays above it.

Alpha-amylase starts out the same in both groups (31.0 and 28.1 units per millilitre), rises three minutes before shooting (67.4 against 51.6) and is still high half an hour later (60.1 against 42.3): the differences between groups appear only at those last two moments. Cortisol is equal at the start (1.22 and 1.23 micrograms per decilitre) and separates only after the competition, at 1.98 against 1.46.

Within each group the correlations tell two stories. Among those who scored well, the only link with the score is anxiety three minutes before (minus 0.86), and that anxiety goes together with amylase and cortisol at the same moment (0.76 and 0.67). Among those who scored less, the score is linked to anxiety half an hour after the end (minus 0.72), and the significant correlations number eight against three: the pre-competition activation carries over into the values recorded afterwards.

Twenty-four university archers took part in the trials; the analysis uses eighteen of them, picked after the competition on the basis of their result, nine in each group. The criterion is stated: the high-scoring group covers those who finished between first and tenth place with at least 330 points, the low-scoring group those who finished between twentieth and thirtieth with 329 points or fewer. All had at least ten years of practice, were on no medication and had no illness, in particular nothing affecting the mouth. Mean age 21.6 and 21.2 years, height 164.3 and 167.9 centimetres, body mass 53.5 and 55.0 kilograms.

The competition was a 50 metre round starting at 2 pm, six ends of six arrows, 36 arrows in all. Lunch was the same for everyone, served between 11 am and noon, after which brushing teeth and taking snacks or coffee were not allowed. Saliva was collected thirty minutes before the competition, three minutes before and thirty minutes after: mouth rinsed ten minutes beforehand, then thirty chews on a cotton swab, sample frozen, amylase and cortisol assayed by ELISA on a VersaMax reader with Salimetrics kits.

Anxiety was collected at the same three moments with a single question on a 1 to 10 Likert scale, drawn from Beck's inventory. The analysis, run in SPSS 23, uses a two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance, with one-way analyses within each group and between-group t-tests at each moment where an interaction appeared, plus Pearson correlations within each group.

The two groups were built after the competition by taking the ends of the results list and discarding the middle: the six archers who finished between eleventh and nineteenth place are not in the analysis. That makes the difference in score a given from the outset, and correlations inside groups selected on the result come out stronger than they would across all 24.

Anxiety is a single answer on a 1 to 10 scale, and the reading thirty minutes afterwards comes when each archer already knows whether she has made the team: at that point the anxiety she reports, and in part the cortisol too, measures the reaction to the result as much as the state that preceded it. The study is observational: nothing was manipulated, no group received a treatment, and the direction of the link stays open.

The numbers have some blemishes. In the text, anxiety three minutes before is once called ANX1, which in the tables is the reading thirty minutes before, and the legend of the second table defines ANX3 as thirty minutes before the competition rather than after. Anxiety in the high group at three minutes is printed as 4.88 plus or minus 10, where the standard deviation is presumably 1.0. Cortisol in the low group thirty minutes before carries a standard deviation of 0.7 on a mean of 1.22, five times that of the other five values in the same table. The post-competition interviews, from which the authors draw the regret and self-blame of the archers who finished at the bottom, were not gathered by any described method.

The sample is women only, Korean, at national level, at a single competition. The same author had published a very similar study in 2016 on another competition, at 30 metres, with nineteen archers: the two registry records stay separate because the data are different.

The study describes two shapes of competition day, not a rule of conduct. Those who scored best had arrived with less reported anxiety, saw it rise only a little three minutes before shooting, and were back below their starting level half an hour afterwards. Those who scored lowest started higher, rose further, and half an hour after the end were still activated, with cortisol having gone up rather than down.

The interesting part is precisely what happens afterwards. The two saliva measures separate between the groups only at the moments close to the shooting and after the competition, not half an hour before, when they were equal: the difference is not a baseline state, it is what happens around the arrows and how long it takes to come back down. This remains an observation on eighteen archers over one afternoon, on a 36 arrow round at 50 metres.

There is nothing in it about how to lower anxiety, and no comparison between methods for doing so: the study administered no treatment at all. And a saliva sample, here, serves to read afterwards what happened at the competition, not to decide anything while shooting.