Choking

Via JAG:

Moments of "just messing up" in high-pressure situations may seem random and uncontrollable, but scientists are beginning to demystify just why it is that we choke, and how we might be able to prevent such high-stakes errors.
It turns out that being too attached to winning may have been what caused Maroney to choke, according to some new research from neuroscientists Johns Hopkins University.
Whether you choke under pressure might have more to do with your motivation: specifically, to what extent that you are driven by a desire to win or by a desire to avoid losing. If you're very loss-averse -- meaning that you hate losing more than you love winning -- your chances of choking will be lower. But for those who value the rush of winning over the pain of losing, the likelihood of choking is often higher.
The Johns Hopkins study found that those who hated losing the most choked when told that they stood to win the most, while those who cared more about winning choked when they stood to lose something significant. In other words, it's all about how you frame the incentive: as a loss or as a gain.
“We can measure someone’s loss aversion and then frame the task in a way that might help them avoid choking under pressure,” Vikram Chib, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement.
The researchers explain this phenomenon by looking at the ventral striatum, a brain region that may connect incentive-driven motivation and the execution of physical performance. The activity of this brain region suggests that an individual's attachment to winning is key to how they perform under pressure.

Read the entire article at HuffPo.