Scientists Discover Simple Trick To Improve Basketball Players’ Performance

A free throw in basketball will have every eye glued to one person. It’s an intensely stressful situation. A research team led by the University of Basel studied whether a friendly tap on the shoulder increases the odds of making a shot.

In difficult situations, physical touch like a hug or a pat on the back can reduce stress. Whether this influences performance in stressful life situations has not yet been studied in detail. A team of researchers headed by Christiane Büttner at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel investigated this question in the context of basketball games. Their results appeared in the journal Psychology of Sport & Exercise.