Hypnotherapy In Adelaide

 

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Theory of Test Anxiety

Anxiety is defined as the “psychological mechanism whereby the current intensification of a dangerous drive results in the elicitation of defences.” George Mandler and Seymour Sarason (1952), developed the theory that anxiety present in testing situations is an important determinate of test performance. Individuals that become highly anxious during tests typically perform more poorly on tests than low-test anxious persons, especially when tests are given under stressful evaluative conditions such as a post-secondary exam. The feelings of forgetfulness, or drawing a “blank” are developed because of anxiety-produced interference between relevant responses and irrelevant responses generated from the person’s anxious state. The difference in performance of a high-anxious test taker compared to a low-anxious test taker is largely due to the difference in their ability to focus on the tasks required. A low-anxious test taker is able to focus greater attention on the tasks required of them while taking the test, while a high-anxious test taker is focused on their internal self, and the anxiety they are feeling. Anxious test takers do not perform adequately on the test as their attention is divided between themselves and the test. Therefore, students with high test anxiety are unable to focus their full attention on the test. Furthermore, anxiousness is evoked when a student believes that the evaluative situation, such as an assessment, exceeds his or her intellectual, motivational, and social capabilities. Researchers Putwain, Woods & Symes (2010), found that a low academic self-concept was associated with higher worry and tension about their abilities to do well on a test. A student's metacognitive beliefs play an important role in the maintenance of negative self-beliefs.

Anxiety reactions can be generalized from previous experiences to testing situations. Feelings of inadequacy, helplessness, anticipations of punishment or loss of status and esteem manifest anxiety responses. As well, the presence of an audience can debilitate the performance of high anxious test takers and increase the performance of low anxious test takers. Interestingly, persons who score high on anxiety scales tend to describe themselves in negative, self-devaluing terms. Highly anxious test takers also blame themselves for their failure significantly more than low anxious test takers.

Working Memory and Test Anxiety

WorkingMemory is essential for understanding the phenomenon of test anxiety. Working memory is a limited capacity system, so the addition of stress and anxiety reduces the resources available to focus on relevant information. By identifying cognitive interventions, it is possible to reverse the effects of test anxiety.

The goal of most testing situations is to measure a person’s level of knowledge or skill in a particular area. If the testing situation itself becomes a factor in that person’s ability to reach optimal achievement, then there can be negative consequences, especially if certain groups are disproportionally affected.

Test anxiety refers to impaired performance created by feelings of stress and discomfort in evaluative situations.

Psychologists Liebert and Morris originally attributed test anxiety to two main components: worry and emotionality. Worry refers to cognitive factors, such as negative expectations or feelings of inadequacy, and emotionality refers to the physical symptoms, such as increased heart rate, muscle tension, or butterflies. Both are aversive elements that can create anxiety, but it is the cognitive factors that have the strongest connection to performance.

Working Memory and Emotion

As discussed previously, people who suffer from test anxiety are more likely to experience negative cognitions while in evaluative situations. These thoughts and emotions create distracting task-irrelevant activity, which uses working memory resources. This is especially important because test anxious persons have been shown to bias their attention towards threatening and anxiety related stimuli more than nonemotional stimuli.

According to the attentional capture hypothesis, emotional stimuli create specific attention demands. They will often dominate a person’s thoughts, and any attempt to suppress them will require additional working memory resources. When working memory divides resources between the aversive cognitions and the task-relevant material, then the person’s ability to use the relevant information on a test will suffer.

Attentional Control Theory of Working Memory

A recent theory involving anxiety and working memory is the Attentional Control Theory. Research by Derakshan and Eysenck found that anxiety largely impairs the processing efficiency aspect of working memory rather than the performance effectiveness component. Processing efficiency refers to the amount of resources used to attain effective performance. Therefore, this theory suggests that students high in test anxiety will have to allocate more resources to the task at hand than non-test anxiety students in order to achieve the same results.

Attentional Control Theory also assumes that anxiety primarily affects functioning of the central executive component of working memory rather than the phonological loop or visuospatial sketchpad. Specifically anxiety affects the attentional control aspect of the central executive and its inhibition and attentional shifting functions. Attentional control is the balance between the two attentional systems, the goal-directed system and the stimulus-driven system. Research suggests that anxiety disrupts the balance between the two systems, therefore causing a reduction in the processing efficiency of the central executive.

Pressure and Performance Theories

There are are two important theories that attempt to explain compromised performance. The first theory is called Distraction Theory. This theory states that high-pressure environments create a dual-task situation, in which the person’s attention is divided between the task at hand and unhelpful thoughts about the situation and possible negative consequences of poor performance. The irrelevant thoughts compete for working memory resources, which reduces the efficiency of their memory retrieval often leading to “choking under pressure.”

According to a different theory, when a person is expected to perform a specific skill, the pressure may cause an increased self-consciousness and inward focus, which can disrupt their ability to successfully perform that task. This is called Explicit Monitoring Theory, which says that thinking about step-by-step procedures can inhibit one’s ability to execute a task. For example, a study by R. Gray found that baseball players put into the high-pressure condition had increased errors, and an increased ability to recall details like the direction their bat was moving. This indicates that the pressured players were monitoring themselves more, which impacted their ability to successfully hit the ball.

Individual Differences in Working Memory

Working Memory Capacity

When people are in high-stakes situations, it impacts individual performance in some unexpected ways. In general, people with higher working memory capacity do better on academic tasks, but this changes when people are under pressure. A study by Beilock et. al tested participants using a modular arithmetic test to conclude that adding pressure will actually decrease the performance of those with high-working memory, but will not lower the performance of those with low-working memory. In other words, those with higher working-memory capacity are more vulnerable in anxiety-producing situations. Beilock states that people with high WM are more likely to use cognitively demanding procedures to solve the problems. These difficult procedures require greater working memory resources, which have difficulty competing with the increase in task-irrelevant interferences. These findings clearly demonstrate the relationship between stressful situations and individual working memory capacity.

There is some contradictory evidence to support the theory that individuals with a high working memory capacity are somewhat buffered against the effects of performance anxiety. A study by Johnson and Gronlund found that individuals' performances on a task showed a significant decrease in accuracy when the participant had low or average working memory capacity, but did not significantly decrease when the participant had a high level of working memory. Further research found that participants with both lower working memory capacity and high test anxiety were more prone to error.

Category Learning

It is not possible to understand the relationship between working memory and test anxiety without exploring the types of learning situations that require working memory resources. Decaro et. al tested the effects of different task categories on the performance of both high and low working memory individuals. In this study, the categories were either rule-based, which relies heavily on working memory, and information-integration, which incorporates more procedural methods. The data show that those with high levels of working memory excelled at rule-based tasks, and those with low working memory excelled at information-integration tasks. When attempting to do procedural tasks, the individuals with high WM were less successful then those with low WM. This indicates that the type of task is an important factor when examining working memory and performance.

Pressure Situation

Many have asked the question: which is more accurate, the Distraction Theory, or the Explicit Monitoring Theory? The full answer is still in need of future exploration, but preliminary research demonstrates the importance of how the individual perceives their evaluative situation. The two types of pressure situation include: monitoring pressure, in which an individual’s performance is negatively impacted due to the presence of an audience, and outcome pressure, in which an individual’s performance suffers because he or she is thinking about the implications of the testing results. Decaro et. al incorporated the earlier findings on category learning to test this phenomenon. They found that rule-based performance was hurt by outcome pressure, but not monitoring pressure, while information-integration performance was hurt by monitoring pressure, but not outcome pressure. In other words, outcomes pressure influences performance on tasks that are reliant on working memory, while monitoring pressure negatively impacts tasks that are more procedural. These findings indicate that performance is compromised in different ways depending on the type of task, and the types of pressure. Knowing this, it is important to pinpoint the exact type of test-anxiety that an individual is experiencing, in order to find the best solution for enhancing their performance.

Interventions Using Working Memory Related Techniques

One cognitive intervention that has been shown to be effective at reducing anxiety is attentional cognitive bias modification.  The main method used to study the intervention is a dot-probe paradigm. In this method, participants view negative and neutral stimuli on a screen and respond only to the neutral stimulus. This method attempts to overcome the attentional bias shown by high anxiety participants, who tend to focus on the more potent negative stimuli rather than the neutral stimuli. When participants are trained to focus on the neutral stimuli while ignoring the negative stimuli, working memory capacity is less strained and is available to place more focus on the task at hand.

Cognitive interventions in general do have many limitations. Some cognitive strategies have even been shown to be detrimental to performance, particularly strategies such as thought suppression. Only a small, recent body of research addresses cognitive interventions, and more research needs to be done to support these new techniques.

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Signs and symptoms

Researchers believe that feelings of anxiety arise to prepare a person for threats. In humans, anxiety symptoms are distributed along a continuum and different symptom levels of anxiety predict outcomes. Responses consist of increased heart rate, stress hormone secretion, restlessness, vigilance, and fear of a potentially dangerous environment. Anxiety prepares the body physically, cognitively, and behaviourally to detect and deal with threats to survival. As a result, a person’s body begins to hyperventilate to allow more oxygen to enter the bloodstream, divert blood to muscles, and sweat to cool the skin. In individuals, the degree to which an anxiety response is developed is based on the probability of bad things happening in the environment and the individual’s ability to cope with them. In the case of test taking, this might be a failing exam grade that prevents the student from being accepted to a post-secondary institution. A person's beliefs about their own competencies are a form of self-knowledge, which plays an important role in analyzing situations that might be threatening. When a person has feelings of low competence about their abilities they are likely to anticipate negative outcomes such as failure, under uncertain conditions. Thus, evaluative situations including tests and exams, are perceived as more threatening by students who have low competencies.

There is a difference between generalized anxiety disorders (GAD) and test anxiety. GAD is characterized by "trait anxiety" which results in a person experiencing high levels of stress across a wide range of situations. In contrast, people with test anxiety have a "state anxiety" which results in high levels of nervousness specific to testing.

Symptoms of test anxiety can range from moderate to severe. "Students who exhibit moderate symptoms are still able to perform relatively well on exams. Other students with severe anxiety will often experience panic attacks."

Common physical symptoms include: headache, upset stomach, feeling of fear, feeling of dread, shortness of breath, sweating, pacing or fidgeting, crying, racing thoughts and blanking out

During states of excitement or stress, the body releases adrenaline. Adrenaline is known to cause physical symptoms that accompany test anxiety, such as increased heart rate, sweating, and rapid breathing. In many cases having adrenaline is a good thing. It is helpful when dealing with stressful situations, ensuring alertness and preparation. But for some people the symptoms are difficult or impossible to handle, making it impossible to focus on tests.

Test Anxiety consists of:

Physiological Overarousal — often termed emotionality. Somatic signs include headaches, stomach aches, nausea, diarrhea, excessive sweating, shortness of breath, light-headedness or fainting, rapid heartbeat and dry mouth. Test anxiety can also lead to panic attacks, in which the student may have a sudden intense fear, difficulty breathing, and extreme discomfort.

Worry & Dread — maladaptive cognitions. This includes catastrophic expectations of gloom and doom, fear of failure, random thoughts, feelings of inadequacy, self-condemnation, negative self-talk, frustration and comparing oneself unfavorably to others.

Cognitive/Behavioral — poor concentration, "going blank" or "freezing," confusion, and poor organization. The inability to concentrate leads to impaired performance on tests. Fidgeting during or outright avoidance of the test. Students often report "blanking out" even though they have studied sufficiently for the test.

Emotional — low self-esteem, depression, anger, and a feeling of hopelessness.

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Causes

There are a variety of variables that cause test anxiety to occur. These variables typically vary from student to student and may include factors such as:

Anxiety, attention, or obsessive compulsive disorders;

Perfectionist tendencies and unrealistic expectations;

Negative self-esteem, self-statements, and criticism;

Poor motivation, lack of confidence, and procrastination;

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Stereotype threat;

Inadequate study and test-taking skills;

Poor prior testing performance;

Pressure from peers, family, and teachers;

Unfavourable testing environments;

Invalid, flawed, and timed tests; and

Ineffective teaching

Poor eating, sleeping and exercising habits.

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Parents are often perceived by students as being a source of pressure, especially when they place a strong emphasis on obtaining high achievement scores on examinations and assessments instead of on the effort made. Research shows that parental pressure is associated with greater worry, test irrelevant thoughts, and stronger bodily symptoms relating to anxiety during a test.

Other causes of test anxiety may include fear of failure, procrastination, and previous poor test performance. As well, characteristics of the test environment such as: nature of the task, difficulty, atmosphere, time constraints, examiner characteristics, mode of administration and physical setting can affect the level of anxiousness felt by the student. Researchers Putwain & Best (2011), examined test performance among elementary children when the teacher put pressure on the students in an attempt to create a more high stress environment. Their findings showed that students performed worse in high threat situations and experienced more test anxiety and worrisome thoughts than when in a low threat environment.

Test anxiety is known to develop into a vicious cycle. After experiencing test anxiety on one test, the student may become so fearful of it happening again they become more anxious and upset than they would normally, or even than they experienced on the previous test. If the cycle continues without acknowledgement, or the student seeking help, the student may begin to feel helpless in the situation.

People who experience test anxiety often have parents or siblings who have test anxiety or other types of anxiety. Anxiety does seem to have some genetic components.