Test performance as a function of the hard-driving and speed components of the type A coronary-prone behavior pattern.

Abstract

Male and female students in an undergraduate psychology class completed a student version of the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS) and several weeks later performed on the first course test of the semester. Test-completion times and test scores were unobtrusively recorded and a series of Pearson product-moment correlations were subsequently performed. These revealed the following: (1) The time urgency component of the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern was negatively related to the amount of time that students spent working on the test (p less than 0.05) but unrelated to the obtained tests scores. (2) The hard-driving and competitive component of the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern bore a marginal positive relationship with time-on-test (p less than 0.10) and a strong positive relationship with obtained test scores (p less than 0.002). (3) Global JAS scores and time were not correlated. However, global JAS scores were found to be positively related to the scores that students obtained on the test (p less than 0.05). It is suggested that the failure of previous research to reach any definite conclusions concerning the relationship between Type A/B behavior and task performance may be due to their utilization of global measures of Type A behavior while ignoring the effects of the component behavioral tendencies. When time urgency and hard-drivingness do not interfere with one another and when the nature of the task makes at least one of these components salient, performance differences should emerge between Type A's and Type B's.