Psychological stress hinders performance, even for Olympic athletes
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were unique not only because they took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also because they were the first athletics event to measure and broadcast competitors’ heart rates as world-class archers made a bid for Olympic gold. Analysis of these biometric data by Yunfeng Lu (Nanjing University) and Songfa Zhong (National University of Singapore, New York University Abu Dhabi) in Psychological Science provides empirical support for something sports fans have long suspected: when athletes feel the pressure, their performance suffers.
“We found that high non-contact real-time heart rate is associated with poor performance,” Lu and Zhong said in an interview. “This suggests that even the best professional athletes are negatively affected by psychological stress, even though they are generally well trained to deal with pressure.”
Olympic archery includes several types of individual and team-based competitions, but for this study, Lu and Zhong focused on individual competitions within the gender for which heart rate data was available. During these competitions, the heartbeats of 122 male and female archers were broadcast as they completed 2,247 shots. The World Archery Federation, in collaboration with Panasonic, measured athletes’ heart rates using high frame rate cameras designed to detect skin reflection and can determine a person’s heart rate 96% as accurately as a pulse oximeter or electrocardiogram.
During each competition, individual archers shot a certain number of arrows at a target, with a time limit of 20 seconds for each shot. Archers could earn a maximum of 10 points for a perfect bull’s-eye, with the number of points decreasing the further an arrow landed from the center of the target.
Lu and Zhong found that athletes whose heart rates were higher before taking a shot consistently scored lower on those shots. Although the age and gender of the archers did not appear to significantly influence the relationship between stress and performance, a number of factors related to the nature of the competition did.
Higher heart rates are more likely to reduce the performance of lower-ranked archers and of any archers who shot second in a match or who had a lower score than their opponent at that point in the match. There was also a stronger relationship between stress and performance closer to the end of each competition, possibly due to the increase in pressure as athletes progressed through the competition, the authors wrote.
“Elite athletes typically receive training to cope with psychological stress, but our results suggest that they are still subject to the influence of psychological stress,” Lu and Zhong wrote.
This study not only provides evidence for the link between stress and real-world performance, but also shows that heart rate captured by high frame rate cameras can serve as a reliable source of biometric data, Lu and Zhong said. in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic where researchers and participants may not be able to meet in person.
“This method could become increasingly important in diverse settings ranging from sports and business to mental health and medicine,” the researchers wrote. “In this regard, our study can be seen as a proof of concept by showing that non-contact real-time heart rate induced psychological stress.”
In future work, this technology could be used to observe how psychological stress affects athletic performance in different sports, Lu and Zhong said. The researchers also want to further investigate how contactless real-time heart rate can be incorporated into behavioral studies in laboratory and field settings.
