Analysis and Visualization of Sports Performance Anxiety in Tennis Matches

• Published in: Advances in Visual Computing Vol. 11241; pp. 407 - 419
• Main Authors: Pokharel, Shiraj, Zhu, Ying
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Sports analytics; Visual analytics; Visual knowledge discovery; Visual knowledge representation; Visualization
• ISBN: 3030038009; 9783030038007
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-03801-4_36

According to sports psychology, anxiety has a big impact on an athlete’s performance in a sport event. Although much work has been done in sports data analysis and visualization, analysis of anxiety has rarely been included in previous work. In this paper, we propose a method to analyze a tennis player’s anxiety level during a tennis match. This method is based on the psychological theories of anxiety and a database of over 4,000 professional tennis matches. In our model, an athlete’s anxiety level is based on three factors: uncertainty, anticipation, and threat. We have also developed data visualizations to help users study the potential correlation between a tennis player’s anxiety level and his/her skilled performance, such as unforced errors, forced errors, winners, serve directions, first-serve faults, and double faults.