Anxiety, advice, and the ability to discern: Feeling anxious motivates individuals to seek and use advice.

Abstract

Across 8 experiments, the influence of anxiety on advice seeking and advice taking is described. Anxious individuals are found to be more likely to seek and rely on advice than are those in a neutral emotional state (Experiment 1), but this pattern of results does not generalize to other negatively valenced emotions (Experiment 2). The relationships between anxiety and advice seeking and anxiety and advice taking are mediated by self-confidence; anxiety lowers self-confidence, which increases advice seeking and reliance upon advice (Experiment 3). Although anxiety also impairs information processing, impaired information processing does not mediate the relationship between anxiety and advice taking (Experiment 4). Finally, anxious individuals are found to fail to discriminate between good and bad advice (Experiments 5a-5c), and between advice from advisors with and without a conflict of interest (Experiment 6).

Anxious and egocentric: How specific emotions influence perspective taking.

“…Participants in the neutral condition wrote about how they typically spend their evenings (Gino et al, 2012). Prior research has shown that this type of autobiographical recall task is a valid 1 Across experiments, preliminary analyses revealed no moderation by participant gender.…”

“…means of inducing specific incidental emotions (e.g., Bodenhausen et al, 1994;Dunn & Schweitzer, 2005;Tiedens & Linton, 2001), including anxiety-related states (e.g., Gino et al, 2012;Kuhbandner & Zehetleitner, 2011;Lerner & Keltner, 2001;Marzillier & Davey, 2005;Whitson et al, 2015;see Lench, Flores, & Bench, 2011, for a meta-analysis), that have carry-over effects on subsequent judgments and behaviors. Spatial perspective-taking task.…”

Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-performance Anxiety as Excitement

“…These effects are mediated by low negotiator self-efficacy (Brooks & Schweitzer, 2011). Similarly, anxious individuals seek out and rely more heavily on advice, even when the advice is obviously bad, because they do not feel confident in their own ability to make good judgments (Gino et al, 2012).…”

“…Individuals who feel anxious tend to focus on the potential negative outcomes of future events and believe that those outcomes are more likely to occur (Lerner & Keltner, 2001;Raghunathan & Pham, 1999). Those beliefs lead anxious individuals to have lower self-confidence, to be more risk-averse than individuals in a neutral state, and to struggle with cognition immediately before and during performance tasks (e.g., Eysenck, 1992;Gino et al, 2012). In contrast, individuals in an excited state tend to focus on the potential positive outcomes of upcoming events and believe that they can achieve more positive outcomes (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999;Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997;Brown & Curhan, 2013;Fredrickson, 2001;Jamieson et al, 2010;Scheier, Weintraub, & Carver, 1986;Schnall, Roper, & Fessler, 2010).…”

“…Extant anxiety research has largely focused on trait anxiety (e.g., Endler, 1980;Eysenck, 1979Eysenck, , 1992Eysenck, , 1997Kantor, Endler, Heslegrave, & Kocovski, 2001), a personality characteristic similar to neuroticism that reflects an individual's susceptibility to anxiety (Spielberger, 1985). Recent work has focused on state anxiety, a transient emotion that anyone can experience (e.g., Gino, Brooks, & Schweitzer, 2012). Trait and state anxiety are inextricably linked.…”