Choking and yips in archers: Clarke 2020 study

An online questionnaire completed by 155 experienced athletes, 69 archers and 86 golfers, related a set of personality traits to having experienced choking or the yips at least once, the yips meaning target panic for archers. Of the whole sample, 67.7% reported having choked, 75.4% of the archers and 61.6% of the golfers; the yips stood at 39.4% overall, 43.5% among archers and 36% among golfers. 28.4% reported both, 11% only the yips, 39.4% only choking and 21.2% neither.

Those who reported choking scored higher on 9 of the 20 traits (the three anxiety sensitivity scales, fear of negative evaluation, private self-consciousness, the need not to show imperfection, worry about mistakes, parental expectations and doubts about one's own actions) and lower on conscientiousness; taken together, these 10 traits classified 71% of people correctly. For the yips there were only four differences, all to do with how one relates to others: more social anxiety, more non-display of imperfection, more perfectionistic self-promotion and less conscientiousness, with 69% classified correctly. The overall effect of the yips in the multivariate analysis narrowly missed the threshold (p=0.06).

Recruitment ran through personal contacts, governing bodies and social media, with a link to a questionnaire on Qualtrics. Adults could take part if they competed at county level or above, for archers, or were golfers with a handicap of 15 or below. Six questionnaires, presented in random order, measured fear of negative evaluation (BFNE-II), anxiety sensitivity (ASI-III), self-consciousness (SCS), the Big Five personality traits (BFI-10), perfectionistic self-presentation (PSPS) and perfectionism (FMPS), giving 20 scores in all.

Choking and the yips were defined by two yes-or-no questions: whether one had ever had a dramatic drop in performance outside one's control, and whether one had ever had the yips (golf) or target panic (archery). Those who answered yes on the yips also said how serious it was, how long it had lasted and whether the problem was still present; of the 61 cases, 47 are classed as the mixed type, with both physical and anxiety components. The analysis crosses choking, yips and sport in a multivariate analysis of variance, then uses discriminant analysis to see how well the traits separate those who report the problem from those who do not.

Everything rests on self-report, with a single question for each phenomenon: the one on choking is so broad that three archers in four said yes, and the analyses treat a distant episode and an ongoing problem alike, even though the questionnaire asked about it. The design is cross-sectional, as the authors acknowledge, so we cannot tell whether the traits come before the problem or are partly a consequence of it: someone who has lived with target panic for years may become more sensitive to other people's judgement for that very reason.

The sample selected itself through social media and contacts, and age and sex were lost for 54 participants because of a software problem. The analyses pool archers and golfers, who differed on 9 of the 20 traits (golfers scoring higher), but the predictors are not reported separately for archers. Some scales have low reliability (agreeableness, openness, non-disclosure of imperfection), the classification rates are calculated on the same sample without a test on new data, and the text is imprecise in places: the abstract mentions 11 variables in the choking model and the results 10, and the reliability threshold is given once as 0.06 and once as 0.5.

For an archer the most interesting figure is how common it is: 43.5% of the archers in the sample reported having had target panic at least once. It should be taken as an order of magnitude, since it comes from people who chose to answer a questionnaire on the subject, but it suggests that among competitive archers the problem is far from rare.

The profile that emerges, tied more to self-image in front of others than to anxiety in general, is a correlation in a mixed sample and does not explain where target panic comes from: the study measures nothing about the shot, the clicker or the aiming phase, and puts no mechanism to the test. It should therefore be kept apart from explanations of target panic, including the de-automatisation account put forward on this site, which remains a hypothesis that these data neither support nor contradict. The authors draw a suggestion for coaches from it, to avoid social comparison when talking to athletes, but that is their recommendation, not a finding of the study.