Choking Under Pressure

Definition

The desire to perform as well as possible in situations with a high degree of personally felt importance is thought to create performance pressure. However, despite the fact that performance pressure often results from aspirations to function at one's best, pressurepacked situations are where suboptimal skill execution may be most visible. The term choking under pressure has been used to describe this phenomenon. Choking is defined as performing more poorly than expected, given one's skill level, and is thought to occur in many different tasks.

Analysis

Some of the first attempts to account for unwanted skill decrements can be traced back to investigations of the arousal–performance relationship. According to models of this relationship (often termed drive theories or the Yerkes–Dodson curve), an individual's performance level is determined by his or her current level of arousal or drive. Too little arousal, and the basketball player will not have the tools necessary to make the shot. Too much arousal, and the shot will be missed as well. Although drive theories have been useful in accounting for some types of performance failures, they fall short in a number of ways. First, drive theories are mainly descriptive. That is, drive theories link arousal and performance, but they do not explain how arousal exerts its impact. Second, within drive theory models, there are often debates concerning how the notion of arousal should be conceptualized (e.g., as a physiological construct, emotional construct, or both). Third, there are situations in which certain types of drive theories have trouble accounting for observed behavior. For example, one derivation of drive theory (i.e., social facilitation) predicts that one's dominant response will be exhibited in high-arousal or highdrive situations. However, this does not always seem to hold when the pressure is on.

Building on drive theory accounts of performance failure, more recent work has attempted to understand how pressure changes how one thinks about and attends to the processes involved in skill performance. These accounts are often termed attentional theories. Two main attentional theories have been proposed to explain choking under pressure.

First, distraction theories propose that pressure creates a distracting environment that compromises working memory (i.e., the short-term memory system that maintains, in an active state, a limited amount of information relevant to the task at hand). If the ability of working memory to maintain task focus is disrupted, performance may suffer. In essence, distraction-based accounts of skill failure suggest that performance pressure shifts attention from the primary task one is trying to perform (e.g., math problem solving) to irrelevant cues (e.g., worries about the situation and its consequences). Under pressure then, there is not enough of working memory's limited resources to successfully support both primary task performance and to entertain worries about the pressure situation and its consequences. As a result, skill failure ensues.

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