Abstract
Research on human anxiety and performance has been conducted within the framework of a narrowly defined paradigm: high and low anxious persons are selected on the basis of their scores on self-reports and then subjected to various experimental treatments designed to elicit situational anxiety. Dependent measures cover indices of autonomic and central-nervous activity, subjective feelings of anxiety, and a variety of performance parameters. This strategy combining quasi-experimental and experimental research turned out to be useful in elaborating and testing hypotheses concerning the relationships between the variables under study and has led to a vast body of relevant findings. In early research on anxiety and performance1, anxiety was conceptualized as an energizing drive as specified in Hullian learning theory2. Observable behaviour was conceived of as an immediate consequence of the interaction between two theoretical constructs, habit (designating the degree of previous learning of specific S-R connections) and drive (as an index of the sum of momentary needs). Habit and drive jointly determine the strength of excitatory potential which manifests itself in observable behaviour in instances of a hypothetical response threshold being exceeded. It was postulated that habit and drive should be related multiplicatively, implying that the value of both variables had to be greater than zero in order to render observable responses possible.
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Glanzmann, P. (1985). Anxiety, stress and performance. In: Kirkcaldy, B.D. (eds) Individual Differences in Movement. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4912-6_5
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