Abstract
The effect of the worry and emotionality components of test anxiety was examined in a picture recognition task. Subjects performed orienting tasks that required a forced-choice decision concerning some physical attribute (e.g., colorfulness) or some abstract attribute (e.g., geographic locale). The abstract-feature decisions led to better recognition on an unannounced test, compared to the physical-feature task. Test anxiety had no effect on recognition performance.
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This research was supported in part by funds from the Research Council of the Graduate School of the University of Missouri.The authors wish to acknowledge Gary Cooper for the provision of the slides used in this study, and Al Goldstein for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Mueller, J.H., Miller, D.J. & Hutchings, J.L. Anxiety and orienting tasks in picture recognition. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 13, 145–148 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03335039
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03335039