Abstract
The overall competitive successfulness and the level of sports results of a wrestler depends mainly on his successfulness in performance of the main scoring technique, and every wrestler uses mostly one or two techniques to finish most of the fights. When this is taken into account, the importance of studying main scoring techniques, as well as the early choice and option of the wrestling technique which will suit best to this wrestler, becomes clear. There are different factors affecting the choice of the technique which is most often chosen and most successfully used. Apart from the influence of morphological and motoric characteristics, as well as the influence of the coach to the choice of preferable technique, there are certain psychological characteristics of a competitor which influence the choice of the technique. The aim of this research is to determine the interconnection between psychological characteristics of wrestlers and techniques they prefer in their fights. The research was conducted on the sample of 21 national team wrestler. Criterion variables are represented by the main scoring techniques of the wrestlers, while the predictor variables comprised their following psychological characteristics: general anxiety, aggressiveness, extraversion, sports self-continence and competitive anxiety. Since it was carried out on statistically small samples, for comparative analysis the non-parametric statistical methods, such as Kruskal – Walis and Mediana test were used. The results of this research have demonstrated that the choice of the dominant scoring technique in wrestling is connected only to some psychological characteristics of wrestlers, mainly these which contain both personal and situational specific influences, such as sports competitive anxiety. It has been determined that the wrestlers characterized by higher level of sports competitive anxiety, i.e. those who are apt to perceive competitive situations as more threatening and menacing, and who react to them with high level of somatic and cognitive anxiety, will predominantly choose and use the scoring techniques with more risk, but which at the same time, lead to lower level of result uncertainty.