A Surprising New Way To Avoid Choking Under Pressure – Imagine You Have The Prize And Are Performing To Keep It

The mental technique is called “incentive reappraisal” and it’s reflected in changed activity in a key brain structure By Christian Jarrett Choking is a ubiquitous and extremely frustrating human weakness – as the stakes are raised, our performance usually improves, but only up to a point, beyond which the pressure gets too much and our skills suddenly deteriorate. Any new psychological tricks to ameliorate this problem will be welcomed by sports competitors, students and anyone else who needs to be at their best under high pressure situations. A fascinating paper in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience documents a new technique for reducing choking that has to do with altering how you look at what is at stake. Moreover, the research shows how this act of reappraisal is reflected in altered activity in a key brain area that’s previously been implicated in how well we can maintain our fine motor control under pressure. Important to understanding the new research is a study published a few years ago. A team led by Vikram Chib at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine first showed – just as you’d expect – that as they raised the monetary stakes, people were more likely to choke at a computer-based task that required fine motor control and coordination, and that this was especially true for people who are more “loss averse”, as identified by their choices in an earlier gambling game – that is, these folk were more mo...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Sport Source Type: blogs