Choking under Pressure: Degrading Flashforwards Related to Performance Anxiety

Abstract

Intrusive vivid images of future catastrophe (“flashforwards”) are important in social fears, like performance anxiety. Previous studies in healthy volunteers found that eye movements reduce vividness and emotionality of negative mental images of past events and future–oriented events. This study tested whether eye movements reduce image vividness and emotionality in students with performance anxiety. Participants (N = 29) imagined two feared future events related to performance anxiety during six 24 s blocks per image: one image was accompanied by eye movements, the other was not. Image vividness and emotionality were assessed before and after these blocks. Relative to the eyes stationary condition, eye movements resulted in a significant decrease in image vividness, and a trend was observed for reduced emotionality. The findings add to earlier experimental findings on the benefits of dual-tasks during mental imagery, and suggest that eye movements and related procedures may be helpful in the treatment of performance anxiety.