Modulation of executive attention by threat stimulus in test-anxious students.

Huan Zhang,Renlai Zhou,Jilin Zou

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01486

Abstract

The study examined whether test anxiety (TA) is related to impaired attentional networks under emotional distraction. High and low test-anxious students completed a modified version of the attention network test (ANT) in which emotional distracters, specifically threat-related or neutral words, were embedded in centrally presented hollow arrows in Experiment 1. Results showed a significant reduction in efficiency of the executive attention in test-anxious students compared to controls when the fillers were threat/test-related words. To evaluate the effect of the test adaptation, the original ANT, which utilized no emotional distracter, was employed as a control task in Experiment 2. We then consolidated the data on efficiency of attentional networks, which were derived from both tasks. Contrasting the two tasks showed that TA reduced executive attention in the revised task only, suggesting an enhanced sensitivity provided by the adaptation from the original task. Taken together, these findings indicate that the attentional deficit in test-anxious individuals represents a situation-related defect of a single component of attention rather than an underlying structural and universal attentional deficit. The results support the hypothesis of attentional control theory and contribute to the understanding of attentional mechanisms in individuals with TA.

Highlights

Test anxiety (TA) has been described as a set of phenomenological, physiological, and behavioral responses that accompany concerns about possible negative consequences or failure in an exam or similar evaluative situations (Zeidner, 1998)
The simple effect analysis suggested that the efficiency of executive attention in high test anxiety (TA) individuals (M = 85.34 ± 6.66) was significantly lower than that of controls (M = 59.38 ± 6.09) in the revised task, while no difference between groups was found in the original task (MTAgroup = 99.23 ± 6.07 versus Mcontrols = 96.64 ± 6.38)
The results indicated that the adaptation of the attention network test (ANT) enhanced its sensitivity to TA when measuring executive attention

Summary

Introduction

Test anxiety (TA) has been described as a set of phenomenological, physiological, and behavioral responses that accompany concerns about possible negative consequences or failure in an exam or similar evaluative situations (Zeidner, 1998). Executive attention and test anxiety (Putwain et al, 2011), cue-target task (Keogh and French, 2001; Liu et al, 2015), central cue task (Chen et al, 2011), negative priming task (Shi et al, 2014), Stroop task (Hopko et al, 2002; Kofman et al, 2006; Lawson, 2006; Bradley et al, 2010; Geen and Kaiser, unpublished manuscript), and switching task (Kofman et al, 2006). It is critical to employ a comprehensive and systematic measurement to inspect potential attentional deficits in test-anxious people thoroughly

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