Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 16, August 2017, Pages 170-175
Current Opinion in Psychology

Choking under pressure: theoretical models and interventions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.05.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • After 30 years, a common definition of ‘choking under pressure’ eludes researchers.

  • Self-presentation and attention models have been proposed to explain ‘choking’.

  • Theory-driven attention-based choking interventions have been successfully tested.

  • Future research should test neurophysiological and kinematic aspects of choking.

In sport, choking under pressure is a major concern for athletes, coaches and sport psychologists because athletes fail to meet self-imposed performance expectations in critical situations (when it counts the most), which is devastating and embarrassing. Researchers have debated choking under pressure definitions, identified personality characteristics that exacerbate choking outcomes, and examined models to determine mechanisms for choking. Based on these investigations, several interventions to prevent choking have been developed and tested. In this review, we specifically discuss current self-presentation and attention models and theory-driven interventions that help to alleviate choking in order to facilitate the understanding of this complex phenomenon by athletes, sport psychologists and researchers.

Section snippets

Explanatory choking models

Choking only occurs when there is an increase in anxiety under pressure [1••]. Since anxiety is essential to existing choking explanations, empirical research has either focused on the antecedents or consequences of the heightened state anxiety. Researchers have predominantly investigated attention-based explanations (i.e., self-focus and distraction models), where choking occurs because the athlete alters (voluntarily or involuntarily) task-appropriate focus as a consequence of the anxiety

Choking interventions

Understanding choking models cannot prevent choking, but it may help researchers and sport psychologists develop theory-driven interventions to minimize choking. Theory-driven interventions are techniques developed based on the choking model in which it is matched. Mesagno et al. [11] argued that researchers should develop theory-matched (or driven) choking interventions especially for the supported self-focus and distraction choking models.

Future research

Researchers have struggled with a global definition of choking since Baumeister [5] defined it as performance decrements under pressure. We believe focusing on performance as a defining element may be one of the problems because performance is determined by a number of factors beyond the control of the actor (e.g., other competitors’ ability), which may intensify the use of the choking label. When performance is the only indicator of choking, then incorrect labelling of a choking incident could

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

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