Intensity of perceived stress prior to a judo tournament among male and female contestants. A preliminary study

An athletic competition is very stressful event for the contestants. They usually suffer from anticipatory stress, the psycho-emotional state, which is vary from that noted at neutral conditions. The higher level of that stress may considerably disrupt concentration of attention [1]. That affective state may be examined with the use of assessing of physiological indi ces, for instance responses of salivary cortisol levels, as well as estimation of intensity and direction of emotional arousal using number of psychometric tools. The most often question naire used in sport are Competitive State Anxiety Inventory 2, which can distinguish intensity of cognitive and somatic anxiety, and which use is often accompanied with self-confidence and self-efficacy estimation. It was found, that intensity of psy cho-physiological responses to a competition depend on several factors, like type of sport, individual strategy of coping with stress, rank of a competition, sex, contestant`s skill level and the others circumstances like risk of painful injury and ratio between motivation to win and motivation to avoid failure. For instance, rock climbing elicits state of anxiety, which intensity is parallel to the risk of falling down from a artificial wall during climbing the same route. This falling induces shortlasting but unpleasant emotion, and the risk and anxiety is higher during lead rope protocol ( low rope belaying) than toprope style (an upper rope belaying) [2]. On the other hand the other studies on climbing did not show style-related differences in anxiety scores [3,4]. With regard to the sex-related differences, it seems, that precompetitive anxiety is higher in female athletes, however, there are few studies, and they were conducted on small sam ples. Among tennis players female contestants show usually higher state of somatic anxiety and lower self-confidence sco res in comparison to their male counterparts, and winners` scores of cognitive anxiety are lower than those reported by losers [5]. Youth female volleyball players displayed higher anxiety and lower self-confidence scores [6]. Psychometric studies on both cognitive and somatic anxiety, showed that less physically and cognitively anxious contestants are of greater chance to pursue their tasks masterly [7]. Objective results regarding assessing of somatic anxiety are provided by the physiological studies. As mentioned earlier, cortisol levels and precompetitive psychical state mirrored each other [2-5]. In soccer players anticipatory cortisol rise is related to unpleasant (but not to pleasant) somatic