Statistical Analyses of How Pressure Impacts Professional Athlete Performance

[bones75]

I work in statistics and came across some studies on how pressure impacts performance. 

I'm just offering up the data/papers, not making an opinion.

I selected 3 studies here because they were the only ones I could find w/ hard data on what they all refer to as "choking". There's literally tons of academic research on psychological impacts on sports, if you want to look yourself (home/away, superstitious routines, etc..), but these are the only ones I quickly found that used hard data.

Please note that these are academic papers, so I'd be cautious into getting too deep into methodology. I included a short summary of the data, normalizations, and what I thought were the relevant conclusions made by authors. I really tried not to be editorial about it.

 

NFL field goals
"Choking under the pressure of competition: A complete statistical investigation of pressure kicks in the NFL, 2000–2017"
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214096#pone-0214096-t002
 - 30k field goal attempts
 - normalized by environmental (at least by temperature, field surface, altitude, precipitation, wind speed, humidity) 
 - normalized by situational (at least by regular vs. post-season, situational pressure, home vs. away, and “icing”, rule changes, individual player performance levels)

"Our findings show that NFL teams can differentiate their kickers’ performance variations in terms of their performance during pressure kicks over using kickers’ performance for longer kicks or difficult kicks"

"kickers are susceptible not only to environmental factors, but also to situational pressure or psychological factors"

"The research also suggests that players who are able to maintain their performance under circumstances of change do so because of aspects of both physiology and psychology"
 

NBA free throws
Review of "Performance Under Pressure in the NBA (2002-2010 seasons)"
http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2011/05/new-basketball-free-throw-choking-study.html
 - No public access to the full paper, so this is someone else's review of it's findings. Note that the reviewer appears to be a skeptic of the phenomenon of "choking". 
 - >400k free throws
 - normalized by at least (home/road, winning/losing, situational (when in the game), shooter proficiency (by team season %), and others). Again, don't have access to the full paper

"In the last 15 seconds of a game, foul shooters hit
            .726 when down 1-4 points (922 attempts)
            .784 when tied or up 0-4 points (5505)
            .776 when up or down 5+ points (4510)
"when you compare the "down by 1-4" group... to the "5+ points" group.... the "down 1-4" is .025 below average, and the "5+" group is .025 *above* average. The difference of .050 is ...about 3 [Standard deviations]."

"I'm not absolutely convinced there's a real effect overall, but yeah, it seems like it's at least possible."
 

Professional Darts
"Performance under pressure in skill tasks: An analysis of professional darts"
 - 32,274 tournament dart throws
 - Read yourself for methodology, pretty techincal

"We find no evidence that professional darts players are impacted by (high) pressure situations"

 

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If you were *mental* enough to read this.... What do think?  

 

(I also found a paper on psychological stress impacts on kinematics and sports performance, but can't find it at the moment. will follow up with it. It's conclusions were something like high pressure situations impact less-trained-individuals more than well-trained-individuals at a certain task)

[bones75]

I still haven't figured out when i can edit a post and when i can't. Here's the link for the darts study if you mods want to put it in my OP.

 

Performance under pressure in skill tasks: An analysis of professional darts

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Understanding and predicting how individuals perform in high-pressure situations is of importance in designing and managing workplaces. We investigate performance under pressure in professional darts as a...

 

[iacas]

6 minutes ago, bones75 said:

I still haven't figured out when i can edit a post and when i can't.

It's just a time limit.

[Club Rat]

11 hours ago, bones75 said:

I selected 3 studies here because they were the only ones I could find w/ hard data on what they all refer to as "choking".

"Where's the Beef" - I mean where the golf stats? LOL
Choking in Golf boils down to pressure situations.

It could happen at anytime during a round.
Some people choke on the first tee shot, or a short putt / putts or when their opponent has a good outcome.
Often, players create their own pressure / choking, simply from poor play.  

I like the way you think, but analyzing a gofer, duh - good luck...

[bones75]

2 hours ago, Club Rat said:

"Where's the Beef" - I mean where the golf stats? LOL

I didn't find this yesterday (I was actually looking for academic journals on another statistics topic when I ran across the previous papers).  But found this now:

The Impact of Pressure on Performance: Evidence from the PGA Tour
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1750984X.2017.1408134#

"our study suggests that an attenuating force, known as choking, does exist in which large rewards lead to a drop in performance due to psychological pressure"

"The findings from our primary model indicate that increasing the value of a putt by around $50,000 will decrease the likelihood of a player making the putt by 1 percentage point. However, for certain shots, such as those taken from 6 to 10 away, the magnitude of the effect is substantially greater. We also show that pressure affects less experienced players more than those that have earned more money throughout their careers, and that the impact of pressure on performance varies based on how well the player has been putting in the tournament up to that point."

'''''''''''''''''''''''

Although off topic, found this reference to golf too:

Choking interventions in sports: A systematic review
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1750984X.2017.1408134#

"Implicit learning represents a distal choking intervention to minimise the accumulation of explicit knowledge during skill acquisition to reduce the likelihood of reinvestment (Masters, 1992). Masters found that golfers who had acquired golf putting skills without any explicit instructions on how to putt a golf ball (i.e. implicit learning) improved their performance under pressure, whereas those who had received specific instructions during the skill acquisition phase (i.e. explicit learning) worsened their performance. Participants, however, in the implicit learning group learned the golf putting skill rather slow in comparison to the explicit learning group."

"In their initial study, Vine and Wilson (2010) trained novice golfers to putt a golf ball using either QE* instructions or technical instructions (the control group). Vine and Wilson found no differences in the learning rate between the groups, but the QE group outperformed the control group when putting under pressure. These findings have been replicated and extended with both novice athletes (Moore, Vine, Cooke, Ring, & Wilson, 2012; Vine et al., 2013; Vine & Wilson, 2011) and experts (Vine, Moore, & Wilson, 2011; Wood & Wilson, 2012) indicating robustness of this intervention."

*QE = Quiet Eye training. Basically the act of visualizing your task before you perform it