This study explored attentional patterns associated with positive and negative emotions during sport competition, and athletes' perceptions of the consequences of these attentional changes for ...concentration and performance. Sixty‐nine athletes completed the Sport Emotion Questionnaire following a national softball competition. They also retrospectively reported their perceptions of how emotions influenced their attention, concentration, and sport performance. Excitement and happiness were more closely associated with concentration than anxiety, dejection, and anger. Although excitement demanded more attention than the negative emotions, the positive emotions were perceived as more likely to lead to a performance‐relevant focus and automatic physical movements, both of which were beneficial for concentration and performance. Emotional intensity increased these effects.
Attention was directed towards negative, neutral, and positive word stimuli to explore the effect of emotions on sensorimotor skill performance. Forty novice and 40 experienced basketballers ...simultaneously completed a free-throw shooting task and a secondary word semantics task. A manipulation check confirmed that the secondary task influenced participants' feelings. Both groups responded faster to neutral and positive words than negative words. Shooting performance of novices did not differ between experimental conditions, but experienced basketballers were more accurate when processing positive stimuli. It was concluded that directing attention towards positive emotion may have benefited sports performance by diverting attention away from execution of the primary task, promoting automatic skill execution by experienced basketballers.
An experiment was conducted on human face recognition performance in an access control scenario. Ten judges compared fifty individuals to security ID style photos where 20% of the photos were of ...different people, assessed to look similar to the individual presenting the photo. Performance was better than that observed in the only other comparable live-to-photo experiment 1 with a false match rate of 9% CI95%: 2%, 16% in this study compared to 66% CI95%: 50%, 82% and a false reject rate of 5% CI95%: 0%, 11% compared to 14% CI95%: 0.3%, 28%. These differences were attributed to divergences in experimental methodology, especially with regards to the distractor tasks used. It is concluded that the figures provided in the current study are more appropriate estimates of performance in access control scenarios. Substantial individual variation in face matching abilities, response time and confidence ratings was observed.
