Sport creates a unique environment where people dedicate large portions of their life towards competing in uncertain environments. Indeed, to make an event as entertaining as possible, unpredictability is promoted by the organisers of sport through divisional structures and high-stakes match-ups. This generates a tremendously exciting cauldron of desire, tension, suspense and, for those who's ambitions are being thwarted, frustration.
In emotionally charged environments, where players are encouraged to play "on the edge" to maximise their performances, such frustration can dictate behaviours, such as lashing out at an opponent or an official. In turn, the inevitable production of a red card ends the player’s participation in the match and significantly reduces the chances of success for their team. How then, can we use emotion in performance without relinquishing control?
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Let's look at three factors that can lead to a player losing their cool - over-arousal, frustration and anger - and suggest some strategies to manage these.
Over-arousal
The study of physiological arousal on performance permeates psychological experiments for over a century. Most famously, Robert M Yerkes and John D Dodson studied the impact of electric stimulation of mice on habit formation in 1908.
In this experiment, 40 mice were placed individually in a box with two available passageways: one black, one white. Taking 10 attempts per day per mouse, the mice would receive an electric shock upon entering the black box. The positive habit (performance), therefore, was entering the white box. Each mouse stayed part of the experiment until they selected the white box on 30 consecutive occasions. To determine the impact of psychological arousal, the electric shocks varied from weak, medium, and strong.
The researchers expected that performance would increase with the strength of the shock. Instead, they found that this was true for weak to medium shocks, but the strong shocks led to a reduction in performance, as the mice became less rationale. This led to the inverted U hypothesis, whereby arousal is considered beneficial to performance to a point, but too much arousal leads to reduced cognitive functioning and therefore, performance. In sport, this might manifest itself in erratic, rather than logical behaviour.
Frustration
All sports fans know about frustration and that lingering feeling in the pit of the stomach that can ruin a weekend. As frustrating as it might be for a fan, that frustration is amplified for a player - and it is through the roof for a coach on the sideline
Frustration typically results from unmet expectations. When you know that you are capable of so much more than you have just exhibited. It was John Dollard and colleagues who first made the link between frustration and aggression in 1939, noting that aggression is a logical outcome of frustration. There are of course other causes of aggression and other responses to frustration, but the link between the two is a common causal relationship.
Let’s consider a sporting example. The expectation of an attacking player is to score, while the very purpose of a defender is to block their efforts toward achieving this goal. Sport is contrived to generate frustration. In individual sports, such as tennis, the success of one player relies on the unmet expectations of the other. It’s no wonder we see smashed rackets.
Anger
Anger is an emotional state requiring (a) physiological response, such as increased heart rate, (b) a thought, such as feeling wronged, and, typically, (c) an associated behaviour, such as lashing out. This is also a state for which most of these ingredients are nicely mixed into the pot of a competitive sporting event. Because players and coaches experience this, they also know that their opponents do too. This leads to a battle of being the best at winding up the opponent while maintaining your own cool.
So how do you keep your cool?
At the beginning of this piece, I referred to a sporting event as a cauldron. Imagine then, the cumulative effects of over-arousal, frustration and anger. On their own, they are easier to manage. You’ll find players that are winning will get over a perceived bad refereeing decision without too many problems. But when there is a combination of factors, how can an athlete (or a coach) cope?
Firstly, performers should understand their optimum level of arousal. In 2020, Yuri Hanin refered to this as an Individualized Zone of Optimum Functioning (IZOF). Players can consider their own zone and identify strategies for getting there. While a team coach might naturally be more or less intense, and therefore influence the dressing room environment, individuals might adopt relaxation if their IZOF if at low levels of arousal, or inflammatory self-talk if they believe that they perform best when highly aroused.
As frustration is derived from unmet expectations, we can reduce frustration by removing expectations as much as possible. That is not to say that we lower our standards. On the contrary, we can set the highest possible standards (why aim for anything less?), but never expect that to happen. By removing expectation, we evaluative things more rationally. Expectations force us into a false dichotomy of evaluation – good or bad, success or failure. This takes us out of the present and ruminating on what has already happened.
Self-talk is also an effective way to stay present and can be used to control anger. That anger requires reflection on a past event. If we can use effective self-talk to stay focused on the present and execute the skills we’ve practiced, the anger is not given sufficient oxygen to get out of control. And if all those things go well – you might also win – it’s much easier to stay cool when you win.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
