Correlating Anxiety and Risk Perceptions of Future Academic Prospects Among High-Achieving Students

Abstract

The twenty-first century is redefining the boundaries of adolescent mental health with its “epidemic of anxiety.” As a psychologically vulnerable demographic, academically intensive high school students are as unrivaled in their anxiety levels as they are in their ambition, which inflates their fear factors and undermines their personal values as well. In this paper, I expand on this subject by specifically exploring high-achieving students’ risk perceptions of their future academic prospects and how they correlate with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). This study dives into the inquiry by utilizing quantitative survey research followed by a mixed cross-examination analysis. A total of 47 Advanced Placement high schoolers responded to the survey, and, based on the final numerical values assigned to their anxiety and risk perception levels, I calculated several correlation coefficients to interpret the results. My findings demonstrated that there was a strong positive correlation between anxiety and risk perceptions of academic prospects among high-achieving students. Despite their superlative academic statistics, results showed that many of the participants not only had high anxiety levels but also perceived a substantial amount of risk for their future success. This target population comprises only a fraction of teenagers who experience such symptoms, but this study presents how they uphold negative trends in anxiety-related disorders that require more attention and research in the field of psychology as a whole.