As arousal is so pervasive and an almost inevitable consequence of sport performance, understanding the arousal-performance relationship is of great interest to sport psychology practitioners seeking to help athletes gain the benefits of optimal arousal for peak performance.Īrousal can be measured centrally in the brain using an electroencephalogram, or peripherally autonomic measures, such as heart rate, peripheral temperature, blood volume pulse rates, and muscle tension, as indicators. In some circumstances, such as during power, strength, or endurance tasks, this tends to have a positive effect on performance, whereas in activities requiring fine muscle control high arousal is typically detrimental to performance. Sports performance in training and competition can be highly arousing, with heart rate and mental alertness typically increasing significantly. Our study investigated this disparity further. Classical and self-selected relaxing music increased subjective perceptions of relaxation more than hard rock music, but no differences were found on the physiological indicators of arousal, highlighting a disparity between perceived effects of music on arousal and objectively assessed effects.
previously studied the effects of different types of music on relaxation levels, skin temperature, and heart rate when listening to classical, hard rock, self-selected relaxing music, and no music. The present study focused on use of music for arousal control, extending the existing literature in the area. The demonstrated benefits of music listening for athletes include arousal control, lowered perceived effort, improved affective states, synchronization effects, and enhanced performance. Music listening is associated with sport in several ways, including for entertainment, eliciting patriotism and pride, and enhancing the psychological state of athletes. Practitioners can apply unfamiliar relaxing and arousing music with imagery to manipulate arousal level. Researchers should examine the impact of unfamiliar relaxing and arousing music played during imagery on subsequent performance in diverse sports. Subjective music ratings and physiological measures showed, as hypothesized, that unfamiliar relaxing music was the most relaxing and unfamiliar arousing music was the most arousing. Participants’ galvanic skin response, peripheral temperature, and electromyography were monitored during music played concurrently with imagery. Then, 12 skilled shooters performed shooting imagery while listening to the three preselected music excerpts in randomized order. First, appropriate music excerpts were selected. The purpose of the present study was to investigate effects of relaxing and arousing classical music on physiological indicators and subjective perceptions of arousal during imagery of a sport task. Beneficial effects of music on several performance-related aspects of sport have been reported, but the processes involved are not well understood.