The directional perception of the frequency of anxiety symptoms between elite and non-elite female football players

Abstract

Within the competitive anxiety literature, researchers have failed to consider whether the frequency of symptoms have an effect on performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the directional perception of the frequency of anxiety symptoms over a temporal period of seven days between non-elite and elite female footballers. A quantitative research design was applied to the study using a modified version of the CSA1-2 (Martens et al., 1990) which was completed at four different stages of the precompetitive phase of a football game (7days, 2days, 1day, 3hours). 16 footballers were used after giving their consent to participate in the study, elite footballers (N=8) from Women’s Welsh Football Team and non-elite footballers (N=8) from UWIC Women’s Football Team. A mixed ANOVA design was carried out which demonstrated that the directional perception of cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and self-confidence responses differed between the skill level groups; non elite perceiving symptoms as debilitative and elite athletes perceiving symptoms as facilitative. Dependent t-test revealed that the means collected from the footballers differed significantly for the interactions found in the initial ANOVA testing of self-confidence frequency, and direction perception of cognitive, somatic and self-confidence responses. The findings are discussed with relevance to the literature examining frequency and directional perception of anxiety symptoms in relation to performance. The importance of the findings in the present study is highlighted in the discussion of the practical implications and the recommendations for future research.