Why panic can help us to perform in public

ASKED to give a speech in front of an audience, many of us experience sweaty palms and a rising sense of panic.

But the fear of humiliation actually spurs us on to do better when people are watching us than when we are alone, a study found.

Researchers asked volunteers to play a tricky computer game involving moving a cursor to reach a crosshair target at the optimum speed, paying them a small amount based on how well they did.

When watched by an audience of two, 18 of the 20 participants did better than when playing alone.

Brain scans showed that when they knew they were being observed, the parts of the brain linked to social awareness and reward triggered those controlling motor skills to improve performance. The study’s lead author Dr Vikram Chib, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in the US, said: ‘An audience can serve as an extra bit of incentive.’

When people were watching, participants were an average of 5 per cent better at the game, with some up to 20 per cent better.

Only two out of the 20 failed to see an improvement in front of an audience.

The findings, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, suggest a small audience boosts the incentive to do well.

But if the audience was a lot bigger, and the stakes higher, the results could have gone the other way.

‘Here, people with social anxiety tended to perform better,’ Dr Chib said. ‘But at some point, the size of the audience could increase the size of one’s anxiety. We still need to figure that out.’

‘An extra incentive’