The Relationship of State Anxiety, Feedback, and Ongoing Self-Reported Affect to Performance in Complex Verbal Learning

Abstract

The feedback in this study consisted of comparisons with high, average, and low standards of achievement; the verbal-learning task correlated A.40 with actual classroom learning. Higher anxiety was found to be significantly related to poorer performance on the task. Going from high, to average, to low standards of comparison, there was a significant trend for performance to improve. For the group as a whole, positive self-reported affects correlated positively with performance and negative affects correlated negatively. For the mediumand low-anxiety groups, a majority of the positive affects correlated positively and a majority, of the negative affects correlated negatively. For the high-anxiety group, however, a majority of the positive affects correlated negatively and a majority of the negative affects correlated positively with performance. Affect change preceded establishment of any significant affect-performance correlations. That the significant effects of feedback and anxiety were not reflected in the self-report scales of affect highlights the importance of verifying the outcome of experimental manipulations assumed on an a priori basis to alter the subject's internal state. The purposes of this study were to investigate the relationship of state anxiety, feedback consisting of comparisons with high, average, and low standards of achievement, and ongoing affective experiences to performance on a complex learning task. The experimental variables and methodology were selected after consideration of several lines of research. Since the development of the Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Test Anxiety Questionnaire, interest in the relationship of affect to verbal learning has centered predominantly on anxiety.1 Results of numerous studies suggest that stronger and more consistent relationships are obtained when specific measures of situational anxiety (such as the Test Anxiety Questionnaire) are correlated with performance than when a general measure (such as the Manifest Anxiety Scale) is employed.2 Consistent with these findings, Received for publication November 11, 1969. 1Janet A. Taylor, A personality scale of manifest anxiety, J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 48, 1953, 285-290; G. Mandler and S. B. Sarason, A study of anxiety and learning, J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 47, 1952, 166-173. 21. G. Sarason, Empirical findings and theoretical problems in the use of anxiety scales, Psychol. Bull., 57, 1960, 403-415.