Supportive Audience Research Articles

Effects of a supportive or an unsupportive audience on biological and psychological responses to stress.

Although social support is related to substantial benefits for health and well-being, research has uncovered qualifications to its benefits. In a test of the psychological and biological impact of an audience on responses to laboratory stress challenges, 183 participants going through the Trier Social Stress Test experienced either (a) an unsupportive audience, (b) a supportive audience, or (c) no audience. Both audience conditions produced significantly stronger cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure responses to the stress tasks, relative to the no-audience control, even though the supportive audience was rated as supportive. Contrary to hypotheses offered by several theories, these effects were not moderated by self-esteem, individual differences in psychological resources, or baseline social support. Psychological resources and baseline social support were, however, tied to more beneficial biological and psychological profiles at baseline and at recovery in some cases. It was concluded that when one must perform stressful tasks in front of an audience, evaluative concerns may outweigh the potential benefits of a supportive audience.

Pursuing Health IT: The Delicate Dance Of Government And The Market

Pursuing Health IT: The Delicate Dance Of Government And The Market

Audience support and choking under pressure: A home disadvantage?

This paper highlights the not-so-obvious but compelling reasons why the same supportive audiences that can help performers attain their highest potential also may increase performers' risk of choking under pressure. Drawing primarily from social psychology research and theory, we conclude that audience support magnifies performance pressure and induces performers to avoid failure rather than seek success during the most critical moments of performance contests. Although supportive audiences can inspire performers to excel when motivation would otherwise be lacking, audiences may also lead performers towards maladaptive self-monitoring and overcautiousness when the stakes are highest. The increased self-focus that supportive audiences induce can disrupt the automatic execution of the skills performers possess. Dispositional and situational moderators of the relationship between audience support and performance are reviewed.

Motor Performance as a Function of Audience Affability and Metaknowledge

Butler and Baumeister (1998) suggested that performance decrement of a difficult skill-based task occurring only in the presence of a supportive audience could be explained by “a cautious performance style” (p. 1226). A potential alternative explanation stems from Masters’ (1992) contention that skill failure under pressure occurs when performers attempt to control motor performance using explicit knowledge. It was proposed that a skill acquired with minimal metaknowledge (i.e., a limited explicit knowledge base) would remain robust regardless of audience type. To test this hypothesis, a table tennis shot was learned with either a greater or a lesser bank of explicit task knowledge. Performance was subsequently assessed in the presence of observation-only audiences, supportive audiences, and adversarial audiences. Consistent with hypotheses, supportive audiences induced performance decrement in the explicit-learning group only. It was argued that supportive audiences engender higher levels of internally focused attention than do adversarial or observation-only audiences, increasing the chance of disruption to skill execution when performance characteristics involve a large amount of explicit processing.

The Varied Impact of Social Supporton Cardiovascular Reactivity

Two experiments examine the hypothesis that the effect of social support on cardiovascular reactivity depends on participants' evaluative concerns and their motivation for task performance. In both experiments, heart rate and blood pressure were recorded while participants gave a speech to either a supportive or nonsupportive audience, with the experimenter either present or absent. Experiment 1 showed that support decreased performer reactivity relative to nonsupport when the experimenter was present, whereas support increased reactivity when the experimenter was absent. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern and helped clarify interpretation of the results. The results may help resolve inconsistencies in previous support and reactivity literature, and suggest that social support may not always improve health by lowering cardiovascular reactivity.

ProMED-mail: background and purpose.

Vol. 7, No. 3 Supplement, June 2001 Emerging Infectious Diseases 563 The online program to monitor emerging diseases (ProMED-mail) was established in 1994 with the support and encouragement of the Federation of American Scientists and SatelLife. The principal intent of ProMED-mail is to assist local, national, and international organizations in disseminating, as rapidly as possible, reports of outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases wherever they occur; these reports are taken from sources such as media reports, online summaries, local observers, official reports, and others. Subscribers are encouraged to contribute reports and to participate in the dialogue. With a minimum amount of funding, volunteer moderators, and a bulk mailer in Newfoundland, ProMEDmail grew from 40 subscribers in 1994 to its present number of over 20,000 in more than 160 countries; there are no subscription fees. Since 1999, ProMED-mail has been administered by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, with servers and software furnished by Oracle, Inc. The e-mail service provider is located in the Harvard School of Public Health. At a “Meet the Professor” session of the 2000 International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases,” ProMED-mail staff described the history and purpose of the list-serve and fielded a wide range of queries from an attentive and supportive audience, most of whom were already familiar with ProMED-mail but not, it turned out, with the website . “Would ProMED-mail report the occurrence of Ebola disease if it occurred in New York City?” Of course. “Has ProMED-mail felt constrained by governments or individuals in governments from reporting disease occurrences?” No. ProMED-mail: Background and Purpose

Vítězslava Kaprálová: a remarkable voice in 20th-century Czech Music

It was with enormous pride in the achievements of his 23-year-old protégé Vítězslava Kaprálová that Bohuslav Martinů wrote the following in his review of the 1938 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival, held in London:The very first item on the programme of the Festival was Military Sinfouictta by Vitězslava Kaprálová – an opening with great promise for both the festival and the composer. Her performance was awaited with interest as well as some curiosity – a girl with a baton is quite an unusual phenomenon – and when our ‘little girl conductor’ (as the English newspapers called her) appeared before the orchestra, she was welcomed by a supportive audience. She stood before the orchestra with great courage and both her composition and performance earned her respect and applause from the excellent BBC orchestra, the audience, and the critics. … Kaprálová's international debut is a success, promising and encouraging.

The trouble with friendly faces: Skilled performance with a supportive audience.

In 3 experiments, supportive audiences were associated with unexpected performance decrements (i.e., "choking" under pressure). On a difficult, skill-based task, participants were more likely to fail when observed by supportive audiences than when observed by nonsupportive audiences. When the criterion for success was easy, supportive audiences had no effect. With a difficult criterion, supportive audiences elicited cautious, protective strategies that were associated with poor performance: Speed decreased without improving accuracy. Despite impairments caused by supportive audiences, performers found supportive audiences more helpful and less stressful than neutral or adversarial audiences, and participants believed (wrongly) that they performed better with a supportive audience. Results suggest that people are not aware of debilitating effects of supportive audiences and may opt for emotional comfort rather than objective success.

The trouble with friendly faces: skilled performance with a supportive audience.

In 3 experiments, supportive audiences were associated with unexpected performance decrements (i.e., "choking" under pressure). On a difficult, skill-based task, participants were more likely to fail when observed by supportive audiences than when observed by nonsupportive audiences. When the criterion for success was easy, supportive audiences had no effect. With a difficult criterion, supportive audiences elicited cautious, protective strategies that were associated with poor performance: Speed decreased without improving accuracy. Despite impairments caused by supportive audiences, performers found supportive audiences more helpful and less stressful than neutral or adversarial audiences, and participants believed (wrongly) that they performed better with a supportive audience. Results suggest that people are not aware of debilitating effects of supportive audiences and may opt for emotional comfort rather than objective success.

Where is the home choke?

Lab and field data did not support the home-choke hypothesis as it was articulated by R. F. Baumeister and A. Steinhilber (1984). Home teams do not perform poorly in key games. Furthermore, evidence favors a darker form of choking (social pressure plus self-doubts), not the kinder form (disruptive fantasies of success in front of a supportive audience) that explicitly distinguished the home choke. R. F. Baumeister's (1995) reply clouded the concept of the home choke and blurred the standards for its assessment. Even the new measure he proposed usually favored the home team. For coaches and players, the data offer a straightforward conclusion: Take the home field if you have a choice

Kingdom of Desire: The Three Faces of Macbeth

The idea of a Beijing opera adaptation of Macbeth was hatched in 1983 by a group of young actors in Taipei who were discussing the decline of Beijing opera. As artists, they wanted to keep their form alive and stimulating and were not content to perform museum pieces or serve as mere preservers or repositories of a bygone culture. They were concerned because Beijing opera was not only losing its present audience of elderly knowledgeable supporters but failing to attract new replacements; without an audience appreciative of the subtleties of the form, it would gradually disappear. This younger generation of Beijing opera performers had to find a source of renewal that not only gave them artistic inspiration but also validated their activity in the eyes of the young intellectuals they wanted to attract. Noting both the diminishing audience and the decreasing enrollment in the Beijing opera training schools, scholars and performers have begun to analyze the troubling situation and consider solutions. Beijing opera today confronts several problems: the archaic language has created a dependency on subtitles projected on screens to help both Taiwaneseborn and mainland-born spectators alike, a stopgap solution that inhibits proper development of the form; the music-now that many audience members are more familiar with Western music, they find the sounds of the Beijing orchestra too raucous and unappealing; the arias, emphasized at the expense of dramatic content, no longer sustain the audience's interest; and, most seriously, Beijing opera appears irrelevant to the modern world, embodying as it does an older morality and worldview (Perng 1989, 132).1

The Effect of the Audience on the Home Advantage

According to a social psychological model for the home advantage, a supportive audience encourages the home team to play up to potential, while an unsupportive audience has the opposite effect. The audience's biased behavior results in an increase in penalties on the visiting team. The model was tested by conducting a content analysis of 56 matches shown on Finnish television between July 1984 and March 1986. The content analysis of each match registered the audience's clear reactions ( N = 126), goals, and penalties over a 5-minute playing time. The results did not confirm our theoretical model. When the audience supported the home team, the team scored more points and made more fouls than the visiting team. At the same time, the home team also scored more points when the audience supported the visiting team.

Self‐Consciousness, Self‐presentation, and Performance Under Pressure: Who Chokes, and When?

Choking under pressure by persons low and high in self‐consciousness was examined as a function of two sources of performance pressure: audience and performance feedback. Subjects competed with an alleged opponent on a psychomotor task while alone, before a supportive (same team) audience, or a nonsupportive (opposing team) audience. Before the critical trial, subjects learned that their team was either somewhat ahead of or somewhat behind the opposing team. Self‐consciousness, audience, and feedback interacted to affect performance during the critical trial. When disappointing the audience was likely, subjects low in self‐consciousness choked. Subjects high in self‐consciousness tended to choke when they were told that their team had fallen behind. It is suggested that persons who are low and high in self‐consciousness experience different types of performance pressure due to disparate self‐presentational motives.

The Home Field Disadvantage in Sports Championships: Does It Exist in Hockey?

Popular belief in home field has persisted for many years in organized sports (Koppet, 1972). Recently this belief has received empirical support. Schwartz and Barsky (1977) found the home team winning 53% of the time in professional baseball, 60% in professional football, 64% in professional ice hockey, and 64% in college basketball. Edwards (1979) found the home team winning 54.4% of the time in professional football, 58.6% in college football, and 55.6% in professional baseball. Varca (1980) found the home team winning 70% of the time in college basketball. Thus, through statistical analysis, all of these studies confirm the popular belief in the home court advantage. Although these studies consistently support a home field advantage, Baumeister and Steinhilber (1984) have recently reported that under certain conditions the home field may be disadvantageous. Specifically, they hypothesized that the imminent opportunity of winning a major championship in front of a supportive audience would lead to a paradoxical decrement in performance. This was expected to be the result of self-presentational concerns that interfere with the execution of skillful responses. An analysis of archival data from championship playoffs in professional baseball and basketball supported their reasoning. Comparing home-win percentages of the first 2 games of the baseball world series with the last game during the period 1924 to 1982, Baumeister and Steinhilber found the home team winning 60% of the time in games 1 and 2 but only 40% of the time in the last game, whether the last game was game 5, 6, or 7. When the analysis was restricted to defining game 7 as the decisive game, a similar reversal of the home team advantage was apparent. Similarly, using National Basketball Association championship series between 1967 and 1982, they found the home team winning 70% of the time in games 1 through 4 but only 46% of the time in the last game, whether it was game 5 ,6 , or 7. When the analysis was restricted to the 13 series that lasted all seven games, a similar reversal of the home team advantage was apparent.

Paradoxical effects of supportive audiences on performance under pressure: The home field disadvantage in sports championships.

Paradoxical effects of supportive audiences on performance under pressure: The home field disadvantage in sports championships.

Paradoxical effects of supportive audiences on performance under pressure: The home field disadvantage in sports championships.

On the basis of recent research on self-presentation and self-attention, we predicted that the presence of supportive audiences might be detrimental to performance in some circumstances. Specifically, the imminent opportunity to claim a desired identity in front of a supportive audience might engender a state of self-attentio n that could interfere with the execution of skillful responses. Archival data from championship series in two major league sports supported this reasoning. In baseball's World Series, home teams tend to win early games but lose decisive (final) games. Supplementary analyses suggested that the pattern occurs when the home team has the opportunity to win the championship and that it does involve performance decrements by the home team. Similar patterns were found in semifinal and championship series in professional basketball. The present study concerns whether the presence of supportive versus unsympathetic audiences could interact with opportunities for claiming desired identities to cause paradoxical decrements in the quality of performance. Researchers of self-presentation have used terms such as audience and performance to describe self-presentation ever since Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical analysis of behavior. Our study seeks to test self-presentational hypotheses in the context of actual professional performers and their audiences. We chose professional athletic contests because they provide circumscribed, quantifiable performances and because careful records are generally kept. Our hypotheses were derived by the three steps that follow.