Neural Correlates of Choking Under Pressure: Athletes High in Sports Anxiety Monitor Errors More When Performance Is Being Evaluated

Abstract

We investigated the relationship between performance-related anxiety and the neural response to errors. Using the sport anxiety scale, we selected university athletes high in sports anxiety and low in sports anxiety. The two groups performed a spatial Stroop task while their performance was being evaluated by an experimenter and also during a control (i.e., no evaluation) condition. The error-related negativity was significantly larger during the evaluation than control condition among athletes who reported high performance-related anxiety. These results suggest that performance evaluation may make errors particularly aversive or salient for individuals who fail to perform well under pressure.