Arousal and Athletic Performance

Arousal as a Category of Bodily Experience

Traditionally, arousal describes the intensity of the physiological functions of an organism as a reaction to personenvironment (PE) relationships. However, the definition of arousal as a bodily reaction captures only one aspect of PE relationships. According to Lev Vygotsky, to study something as indivisible unity, it is necessary to find a construct that would capture the characteristics of both interacting elements. In psychology, such a construct to study PE interactions is experience, reflecting a person's attitude toward the environment and showing the meaning of environment for the person. Experience has a biosocial orientation because it is always someone's experience of something and as such is best represented as a unit of consciousness. Thus, the analysis of any difficult situation should focus not so much on the situation or on a person per se but on how this situation is experienced by this person.

From this perspective, arousal as bodily experience is a component of total human functioning reflecting the nature of past, ongoing, or anticipated PE interactions. The PE interactions representing the relationships between task demands and a person's resources include the predominance of an organism over the environment, the balance between a person and the environment, and the predominance of the environment over an organism. Three types of bodily experiences are (1) statelike situational experiences; (2) traitlike, relatively stable patterns of experience; and (3) meta-experiences as preferences and rejections of experiences based on awareness of their helpful or harmful effects. Meta-experiences determine an athlete's appraisal of performance situations and choice of coping strategies.

Multidimensionality of Situational Bodily Experience

Arousal as complex situational bodily experience is multidimensional, and its systems description as a component of performance-related psychobiosocial states includes at least five dimensions: form, content, intensity, time, and context.