To what extent will arousal influence preformance in netball.

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AROUSAL

Arousal,

"A general physiological and psychological activation that varies on a continuum from deep sleep to intense excitement."

(Gould and Krane 1992)

The relationship between arousal and performance has been a largely researched area over many years. Due to the diverse nature of this subject, many theories have been written in attempt to explain possible influences of arousal on an athlete's performance. Even to this day, research continues and new theories are being thought of. As there are so many theories to choose from, I decided to concentrate my study on only one - Yerkes and Dodson's Inverted-U Hypothesis (1908).

In a game of netball, there are seven positions and each position differs in playing zone and purpose. In my study, I have taken two positions to compare - Centre and Goal Shooter. I chose these two positions as they are quite opposite in terms of playing zones and purposes. As each of these positions are different to each other you would expect differences in the factors affecting their performances. So, to explore this I have researched literature to do with netball and the Inverted U Hypothesis from various sources and will discuss my findings later in this study.

LITERATURE REVIEW

I have gathered my information from a range of sources.

Firstly, I did a lot of research on the Inverted U Hypothesis itself by using various textbooks. Nearly all of the information I found had some kind of explanation as to what the hypothesis is and what it means.

I started with our recommended A-level textbook - Advanced Physical Education & Sport for A-Level (Honeybourne, Hill & Moor - 2000). It stated what is typical in the other sources of information I gathered. It basically says that the Inverted U Hypothesis shows that every athlete has an optimum level of arousal that needs to be reached in order to achieve peak performance.
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If you exceed the optimal arousal level then your performance will decline in proportion to how much over aroused you are.

The Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology (Weinberg & Gould) was more technical and made arousal links to performance. It gives detailed explanations of each theory starting from the earliest one and then smoothly transitioning into the next, showing how they develop from each other. It had no direct links to netball, but gave enough material to apply to my study.

A chapter titled 'The Arousal -Athletic Performance Relationship: Current Status and Future Directions' written ...

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