Performance Anxiety: A Twenty-First Century Perspective

IN HIS ARTICLE Mental Concepts in Singing, Horst Gunter states that the singing voice reflects all of the problems and emotions a person has in his private life.1 It is imperative, writes Gunter, that personality components and situational/environmental influences which may impinge upon vocal freedom and personal expression be considered. One wonders if Mr. Gunter had any idea of the significant changes that would take place in our situational and environmental influences in the short period of time that has passed between 1992 and 2010, and the effect those changes would have on singers in the twenty-first century. anxiety is a common experience for actors, public speakers, and all those who appear before an audience; and it is particularly pernicious for singers. The act of singing requires a high level of expertise in a varied range of skills from fine motor coordination, attention, and memory, to aesthetic and interpretive skills. The physical systems sustaining vocal performance are precisely those likely to be disrupted by the excessive tensions that accompany performance anxiety. anxiety may be so severe that it destroys an otherwise promising career, or it may appear only as a temporary feeling of anxiety at the moment the performer walks on stage. Whatever the degree and regardless of its form, performance anxiety is a phenomenon that must be acknowledged. It is a natural reaction to situations in which we expose ourselves to judgment and evaluation. Performance anxiety is not merely an unpleasant or vexing conditioned reflex we can simply train away by learning various techniques of making a good public impression. The search for our power goes much deeper and lies in the structure of our personality.2 anxiety arises from one's own personal experiences. There is general agreement among writers on the subject, that the anxiety response involves a reactivation of unconscious childhood conflicts and environmental stresses unrelated to singing: inappropriate fears of abandonment, lack of love, fear of failure, and all the ubiquitous psychic pains that mar a person's present existence generally can be traced to early childhood experiences physically stored in the brain.3 In fact, the mechanism is so ingrained for some people, that it has been proposed that performance anxiety may be hereditary. Several studies also have shown that personality and performance anxiety may be inextricably linked. For example, there seems to be a direct correlation between performance anxiety and neuroticism.4 One can identify two types of anxiety. The first is in which there is a predisposition to perceive certain stimuli as threatening. Individuals with high trait anxiety levels tend to exhibit a chronically higher level of arousal in all situations; they either perceive more situations as threatening or respond to threatening situations with more intense levels of or both. The second is state anxiety, which is a situation-specific anxiety state; it can be aroused by the perception of danger, fear, or failure, and worry or threat to self-esteem in a particular situation. Barlow argues that genetic predisposition and sensitizing early life experiences may be sufficient to produce a generalized anxiety or mood (depression) disorder.5 Barlow's model of anxiety is useful in aiding our understanding of performance anxiety in general and music performance anxiety in particular. His model proposes an integrated set of triple vulnerabilities that can account for the development of an anxiety or mood disorder. These are: 1. generalized biological (heritable) vulnerability; 2. generalized psychological vulnerability based on early experiences in developing a sense of control over salient events; 3 . specific psychological vulnerability whereby anxiety comes to be associated with certain environmental stimuli through learning processes such as respondent or vicarious conditioning. …