Self-hypnosis and focus in archers: Islam 2025

Ten archers from the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi completed two questionnaires, one on concentration and one on managing emotions, before and after a self-hypnosis programme. The mean concentration score went from 55.7 to 67.7, and the emotion score from 52.0 to 71.3. Using a paired t-test the authors report t = -28.460 for concentration and t = -64.333 for emotions, with significance of 0.000, and conclude that self-hypnosis improves both, with a larger effect on emotions.

The study does not measure shooting: there is no score, no competition and no physiological data. The final part of the discussion talks about brain waves, cortisol, blood flow to the cerebellum and improved accuracy as if they were results, but none of these was measured.

The design is a single group measured once before and once after, with no control group. The sample is 10 athletes, everyone available; the paper gives no age, sex, level, bow type or years of experience. Concentration was measured with 20 items adapted from the Attention Control Scale and emotions with 18 items adapted from a sport emotion regulation questionnaire, both on a 1 to 5 scale. For the hypnotic induction the authors refer to a 2001 study listed in their references as work on elite archers, which Crossref shows to be a study of golf putting; either way, the paper does not describe the sessions: how many, how long, who led them or what suggestions were used. Even the duration is unclear: the abstract mentions two months, while the methods say the study took place in December 2024 at Barombong Stadium in Makassar.

Without a control group the effect of self-hypnosis cannot be separated from the effects of time, of the attention received, of filling in the same questionnaire twice, or of wanting to please whoever proposed the programme. The questionnaires are adapted versions completed by the athletes themselves, and the paper reports no reliability data for them.

The figures are remarkably regular: the correlations between before and after are 0.986 and 0.990, meaning that almost every athlete went up by the same number of points, which is unusual with questionnaires of this kind. The abstract states that the observed t of 12 is smaller than a table t of 19.3, a statement with no statistical meaning: 12 and 19.3 are the mean differences, not t values. Some of the supporting references, checked on Crossref, have DOIs that do not exist or that lead to articles on other subjects. The tables label the two variables "group A" and "group B", but there was only one group.

For archers the study changes nothing concrete. Ten athletes reported feeling more focused and more in control of their emotions after a programme the paper does not describe, and we do not know whether anything changed on the target. Anyone curious about hypnosis or other mental techniques will find here neither a repeatable protocol nor evidence that they work in shooting. In the registry it counts as a report of a practice used with archers, not as evidence that it works.