Choking: A love/hate relationship for fans.

After catching the last 10 minutes of the Canuks vs, Bruins. I thought these notes from a paper on choking, the yips, and panicking might help sooth things over.


Clark, T.P., Tofler, I. R., & Lardon, M.T. (2005) The sport psychiatrist and golf. Clinics in Sports Medicine. 24(4), 959-971.

Purpose: The authors review pre-performance routine and methods for optimizing focus, and discuss the science behind being "in the zone." The authors also discuss how acute performance failure, or "choking," is best understood as being three separate disorders.
Method: Golf is like “mental chess,” and that the mental component is possibly the toughest part of playing golf. The mental chess of golf is the challenge of how well a player focuses on the shot at hand, rather than being taken off-task by thoughts, emotions, or poorly controlled physiological arousal.
1. Neuroelectric measures, such as EEG and ERP techniques, have findings that suggest that the same attentional mechanisms are affected by hypnosis and dissociation.
2. EEG showing hemispheric operational control in professional golfers.
Results: Golf is uniquely challenging for excessive down time leads to obsessive thinking and distraction, as well as amplification of pre-existing negative self perceptions, performance anxiety, panic, and affective over arousal.
3. Sport psychiatrist can help the athlete interrupt ironic processes by first recognizing when they occur, and then developing strategies to lessen cognitive and emotional overload. Prompt and effective management allows the golfer to attend to the task of preparing to hit his next shot.
4. Researchers at UCSD  and Scripps Research Institute hypothesized that the zone state may be a manifestation of an adaptive dissociation, and that similarities exist between the zone, hypnosis, and dissociation. They characterized the athletic zone as having four essential components: (1) enhanced attentional focus, (2) time slowing, (3) sense of detachment, and (4) super-normal performance.
5. Three distinct forms of performance failure:

• Panicking; when the mind goes blank, and the player relies on instinctive behaviors and loses the ability to think about what steps are needed to attain the goal/objective.
• Chocking; not about reversion to instinct but rather about the loss of instinct or the loss of previously mastered motor programs. Explicit monitoring interrupts the implicit motor execution programs.
• The "yips"; the yips is often referred to as a focal dystonia. Dystonia is characterized as a paroxysmal movement disorder in which an unwanted muscle contraction, or twitch, leads to an involuntary movement. Symptoms of the yips, such as jerks during execution of shots, often result in miss-hits.

Importance: Athletic zone states may be a subset of flow phenomena and might be understood by looking at models of dissociation and hypnosis. Authors also gave a brief summary of treatments for performance failure.