Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety is the evaluative fear response, the sense of being watched and judged, that accompanies high-stakes skilled performance. Eysenck and Calvo's (1992) processing efficiency theory proposed that anxiety occupies working-memory capacity with task-irrelevant worry, forcing an anxious performer to spend extra compensatory effort to protect accuracy. The result is a split outcome: accuracy can look normal on the surface while efficiency, the ratio of output quality to effort spent, quietly collapses. This theory was later extended into attentional control theory (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos & Calvo, 2007), which specifies which attentional systems anxiety disrupts and is the model behind NeuroRank's Composure module.

Reference: Eysenck & Calvo, 1992. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. A player whose stats look normal on a tournament broadcast but who reports feeling twice as mentally drained afterward as after an equivalent scrim.
2. The extra half-second of hesitation before confirming a ranked promotion match's final ability cast, even though the mechanical decision was already made.
3. A streamer's aim looking unchanged on camera while their post-session fatigue and error rate on the following task spike.

See the Composure entry for how NeuroRank operationalizes the attentional control theory model directly: the flanker paradigm's distraction phase measures the RT and accuracy cost of processing task-irrelevant interference, the same resource-competition mechanism performance anxiety exploits under real evaluative pressure.