Den avgörande tävlingen - rörelsemotorik och nervositet

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the level of trait anxiety and to which extent the equestrians reinvest to consciously control their movements, and if the result had an influence on performance. The selected participants were 30 elite equestrians, actively competing in dressage. All participants were competing on a both national and international level in this fine motor skill sport. All subjects of this study were asked to partake in an online survey comprised of two different tests. The first test “state-trait anxiety inventory – form Y-2” (STAI), measured the participants level of trait anxiety. The second test “the movement specific reinvestment scale” (MSRS) measured their tendency to reinvest their movements. Results from three “ordinary competitions” and three “critical competitions” were collected in order to measure performance. Statistical analysis was used to look for correlative relationships within the dataset. Our results showed that there were no significant correlations between anxiety, tendency to reinvest movement and performance. We interpret this results as the sport dressage being a difficult athletic to study because of the high degree of variability introduced by the horse. To benefit the development of future studies, we suggest that the questions asked in the MSRS-test should be sport-specific.