Why do we choke?
Why? An article by Carl Nierenberg posted on MSNBC.com August 14, 2011 attempts to answer the question of why we choke under pressure.
According to the article scientist do not as yet know why we choke under pressure but they have a few theories which may help us to perform better by understanding different types of pressure and how we react to it.
According to Marci DeCaro, an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, not all high pressure situations are the same and how we react to them influences our performance.
The researchers compared how 130 undergraduates processed monitoring pressure, outcome pressure and low key pressure situations and found that tempting the students with a monetary gain hurt their performance by distracting them from an attention demanding task while believing that they were being watched caused them to over focus on the skills needed to complete a task rather then the outcome, causing performance to suffer.
"Pressure hurts performance if it leads you to pay attention in a way that is bad for the particular task you're doing," says DeCaro. Some skills are better performed when you devote a lot of attention to them, like solving math problems, she explains, while others (a well-learned sports skill like your golf putt) are performed better without thinking too closely about the steps you're taking.”
The bottom line? Next time you are playing a really fine game of golf, just relax and don’t think about it too hard.
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