How to keep your cool on the pitch and not see red

Sport creates a unique environment where people dedicate large portions of their life towards competing in uncertain environments. Indeed, to make an event as entertaining as possible, unpredictability is promoted by the organisers of sport through divisional structures and high-stakes match-ups. This generates a tremendously exciting cauldron of desire, tension, suspense and, for those who's ambitions are being thwarted, frustration.

In emotionally charged environments, where players are encouraged to play "on the edge" to maximise their performances, such frustration can dictate behaviours, such as lashing out at an opponent or an official. In turn, the inevitable production of a red card ends the player’s participation in the match and significantly reduces the chances of success for their team. How then, can we use emotion in performance without relinquishing control?

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Let's look at three factors that can lead to a player losing their cool - over-arousal, frustration and anger - and suggest some strategies to manage these.

The study of physiological arousal on performance permeates psychological experiments for over a century. Most famously, Robert M Yerkes and John D Dodson studied the impact of electric stimulation of mice on habit formation in 1908.

In this experiment, 40 mice were placed individually in a box with two available passageways: one black, one white. Taking 10 attempts per day per mouse, the mice would receive an electric shock upon entering the black box. The positive habit (performance), therefore, was entering the white box. Each mouse stayed part of the experiment until they selected the white box on 30 consecutive occasions. To determine the impact of psychological arousal, the electric shocks