Psychological and Skill Determinants of Performance and Creativity in Bouldering: A Pilot Study

Route preview is essential for climbing performance (Sanchez et al.,2012) and creativity (Medernach et al.,2025), enabling climbers to extract functional information from visual cues.While creativity is important for bouldering success (K¨unzell et al.,2021), how emotion regulation (Martin & Collins,2025) and climbing-specific anxiety (Ionel et al.,2024) may influence creativity remains unknown.We hypothesized that climbing ability, route preview and adaptive emotion regulation would enhance creativity and performance, whereas anxiety and emotion suppression would impair them.Sixteen climbers (M age=25 years;SD=2.71) completed two boulder ascents, one with preview and one without.Two independent observers analysed video-recorded performances, rating creativity on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (very low creativity) to 5 (very high).Participants reported bouldering level through IRCRA scale (M bouldering=16.06;SD=5.54) and completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ;Balzarotti et al., 2010) and Climbing Anxiety Scale-20 (CAS-20;Ionel et al. 2024).Regression analyses showed that boulder level positively predicted creativity (β=.62,p< .01), whereas expressive suppression negatively predicted creativity (β=–.38,p< .05 ), explaining 58% of the variance (adjusted R2=.58). Total number of performatory moves without preview was negatively predicted by boulder level (β=– .44,p< .05) and climbing anxiety (β=–.52,p< .05), explaining 67% of the variance (adjusted R2=.67).Skill level and psychological factors appear to be important in bouldering performance and generation of creative solutions.While expressive suppression may hinder creativity during previewed ascents, climbing anxiety was associated with fewer performatory moves.Despite a small sample size limiting the statistical power, preliminary results suggest that emotion regulation strategies may enhance climbers’ creativity and performance