Olympic archers' emotions in competition: Roy 2015

Four Malaysian archers from the Olympic recurve team, all men with a mean age of 23, chose the emotions that usually go with their best and worst competitions and rated how intense they were, following the IZOF model of individual zones of optimal functioning. The emotions fall into four groups: pleasant and helpful, unpleasant and helpful, pleasant and harmful, unpleasant and harmful. In the first two simulated 144-arrow competitions, the intensity of unpleasant, harmful emotions went with lower total scores (r = -0.94, and -0.93 with the deviation from the target score); with a third simulation added, the correlation fell to -0.69, still significant. That one category accounted for 48% of the variance in score. The other three were not significantly related to score or to either error measure.

During the qualification round at the London 2012 Games, three of them rated the intensity of their emotions again, and the authors compared it with each archer's optimal zone. Only athlete 2 stayed within his zone almost throughout, and he scored 669 (20th place); the other two, often outside their zones, scored 658 and 654 (45th and 48th) and went out in their first match.

Each archer's emotional profile was built from a list of 64 emotions: each chose up to five while thinking of two or three good competitions, and the same again for poor ones, and rated their intensity on a modified Borg scale from 0 to 11; two days later they checked their choices again. The optimal zone for each emotion is the mean of the recalled intensities plus or minus half a standard deviation.

The simulated competitions followed the FITA round, 36 arrows at each of 90, 70, 50 and 30 metres for a maximum of 1,440 points, on three non-consecutive days (two in April and one in June). Besides the total score, the authors calculated a mean deviation from a target score per end, set with a total of 1,320 in mind, taken from the top 20 world scores of 2009 to 2011, and a consistency error from one end to the next. They then ran correlations and a regression for each category of emotion. In London, in the 72-arrow qualification round at 70 metres, three archers' intensities were set against their zones over the three days of competition.

Four archers, giving 8 and then 10 pairs of data, produce very unstable correlations, and the degrees of freedom reported (5 for eight measurements) do not match. Repeated measurements on the same archers are treated as independent. The target scores per end do not add up: 58 points per end at 90 metres, more than at 70 and 50 metres, and 58 at 30 metres, where a three-arrow end is worth 30 at most. The deviation from target also correlates with the emotions almost exactly as the score does, which is what one would expect if the two measures depend on each other.

The London account compares three archers; it is not a test. An archer who stays in his zone and scores best may be in better form for many reasons, and the emotion may follow the score rather than come before it. The text says athlete 2 went through to the last 32, while the table says quarter-final. When the emotions were recorded during the competition is not specified. The journal is flagged as a venue with questionable editorial standards and peer review is not documented.

The finding worth keeping is a narrow one. In these four Olympic-level archers, the emotions each of them recognised as unpleasant and harmful for himself (not anxiety in general, nor the unpleasant emotions an archer feels are helpful) were the ones that went with lower scores in the simulated competitions. This fits the IZOF idea that every archer has his own helpful and hindering emotions, and that the effect an archer attributes to an emotion matters more than its label.

The numbers, however, are too few and too fragile to say how much those emotions weigh on the score, or whether the emotion makes the shooting worse or a poor end produces the emotion. The London comparison describes three individual competitions; and the 669 scored by the only archer who stayed within his zone was still below the coaches' target, as the authors themselves note.