Acute stress just before shooting changes an archer's score

The summary today

No study answers this yet. The only experiment on the subject tried and did not succeed, and admits it. Twenty-two Turkish archers aged 11 to 14 shot ten arrows at 18 metres before and after the arithmetic part of a social stress test for children: the score does not change and neither does balance on the plate, but heart rate does not change either, 104.6 beats per minute before and 105.6 after, and the authors write that they failed to produce the stress they intended. The null result therefore shows that the task moved nothing, not that stress before the shot does not matter, and the question remains untested. The most interesting figure in the same study is a different one: those most afraid of the signs of their own anxiety, especially in front of others, shoot worse, with a correlation of -0.63 after the task and of -0.45 already before it.

Also phrased as: "stress before the shot"; "pressure before shooting"; "acute stress and accuracy"; "shooting under stress"; "induced anxiety and score"

Evidence

• 2023
  Context Archers Published later

  22 licensed Turkish archers aged 11 to 14, 6 girls and 16 boys, ten arrows at 18 m before and after the arithmetic part of the Trier Social Stress Test for children: the score before and after does not differ, and neither does mean heart rate (104.64 against 105.64 beats per minute, p = 0.680). The authors write that they failed to induce stress, so the null result says more about the task not working than about stress not mattering.

  Anxiety sensitivity, stress, and postural control: their implications on archery performance in 11-14-year-olds · Hayrettin Hayri Tokmakci, Serkan Özgür, Tuncay Varol

• 2023
  Context Archers Published later

  The same sample on a pedobarography plate for 40 seconds before shooting: sway area 3.66 ± 3.29 square centimetres and centre-of-pressure path 377.17 ± 185.14 centimetres before the task, 3.78 ± 4.80 and 346.13 ± 131.92 after, with p between 0.131 and 0.908. Balance, like heart rate, registers no stress.

  Anxiety sensitivity, stress, and postural control: their implications on archery performance in 11-14-year-olds · Hayrettin Hayri Tokmakci, Serkan Özgür, Tuncay Varol

• 2023
  Context Archers Published later

  In the same study anxiety sensitivity, meaning how much people fear the signs of their own anxiety, goes with lower scores: its social component correlates with the score at -0.454 (p = 0.044) before the task and at -0.634 (p = 0.003) after it, and the total at -0.513 (p = 0.021) only after. It is an association across twenty-two youngsters, and since the task produced no stress it cannot be read as an effect of stress on the more anxious.

  Anxiety sensitivity, stress, and postural control: their implications on archery performance in 11-14-year-olds · Hayrettin Hayri Tokmakci, Serkan Özgür, Tuncay Varol

Status history

1. 2023 Not studied The first and only experiment: twenty-two young Turkish archers shoot ten arrows at 18 metres before and after a mental arithmetic task taken from a stress test for children. Heart rate does not change (104.6 against 105.6 beats per minute), centre-of-pressure sway does not change and the score does not change, and the authors admit they did not produce the stress they were after. Without stress the experiment does not test the claim: the unchanged score says nothing about what genuine stress would do, and the question remains unstudied.

Related

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• Competition anxiety: what it costs an archer's score, and when it arrivesDoes competition anxiety cost archers points? What the studies measured, when in a competition the tension arrives and where the research stops.

Research lines

• 56 studiesAnxiety and confidence in archery competition since 1986
• 48 studiesThe heartbeat and the shot: heart rate and HRV since 1981

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