Reconceptualizing audience presence in music performance anxiety: a multilevel framework of external conditions and internal representation.

This paper develops a multilevel framework to explain how audience presence shapes music performance anxiety (MPA). It distinguishes between external audience conditions, including Physical Attendance (PA) and Alternative Attendance (AA), and internally generated audience representations, termed Imaginative Attendance (IA). The framework also differentiates audience-related inputs in terms of Externally Assigned Identity (EAI) and Perceived Evaluative Identity (PEI), which are integrated through Perceived Social Evaluation (PSE), a contextual appraisal process. PSE shapes cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses, while metacognitive regulation influences whether these responses contribute to threat-focused processing and social inhibition or task-focused processing and social facilitation.