The effect of imaging level before competition on anxiety in wrestlers

This study aims to investigate the effect of pre-competition imagery level on state anxiety in wrestlers. The study group has been composed of 300 men wrestlers aging 11-18 who participated in Turkey championship and Greco-Roman wrestling in Ankara, Sanlıurfa, Elazığ, Kayseri provinces. Participants were asked to apply a demographic information form seeking answers to questions such as age, education level, how many years he wrestled, national athlete status, and parental education level, state anxiety scale and imagery inventory. The data from the inventory was processed in the SPSS.22 package program and analyzed. Explanatory statistics including arithmetic mean, standard deviation, frequency and percentage distributions for demographic information were presented. Skewness and kurtosis test were measured at the first stage to determine the relationship between state anxiety and imagery in sports subscales and some demographic variables. Independent Sample T and One Way ANOVA tests were applied according to the test results. In case there are differences between the variables, Tukey HSD and Dunnet T3 tests were used according to homogeneity results of Post-Hoc tests to determine this difference stems from what group or groups. Also, regression analysis was used to determine the effect level between the variables. Results were evaluated at 95% confidence interval and p <0.05 significance level. As a result of the regression analysis, a statistically significant positive correlation was found between the wrestlers' pre-competition imagery levels and state anxiety levels. Looking at the results of the research in general, It was determined that age, sports year, national athlete status, wrestlers in the family, father's education level and place of residence were effective at the level of imagination and the increase in the level of imagination caused a decrease in the state anxiety level.