Anxiety and stress in learning: the role of intraserial duplication.

Anxiety (drive), stress, and serial-position effects in serial-verbal learning.

“…The findings in experiments which compared the performance of HA and LA 5s on serial-learning tasks have been only partially consistent with predictions derived from drive theory (e.g., Lazarus, Deese, & Hamilton, 1954;Lucas, 1952;Montague, 1953). In these studies, HA 5s were superior to LA 5s on serial tasks in which it could be reasonably assumed that correct responses were dominant relative to incorrect responses, and inferior on tasks in which competing responses were considered stronger.…”

The influence of anxiety upon learning: Interference or drive increment?1

“…The "new syllable" errors These are syllables which are not from the list (although they may contain one or two letters which occur in other syllables in the hst) 3 The "partial response" errors These are incomplete syllables, consisting of one or two letters only. 4 The "no response" errors These occur when the subject does not give any response to the preceding syllable A response is considered as a partial syllaWe, an incorrect syllable, or a correct syllabic…”

The Correlates of Manifest Anxiety in Paired Associate Learning

“…y under all conditions The difference was small under the first condition, larger under the second, and largest under the third In a second experiment, Lazarus, Deese, and Hamilton (9) utilized a similar design with two differences 1) 5", ? were selected from the upper and lower quartiles of the Taylor A-scale, and 2) whereas the nonsense syllables in the first study contained a minimal amount of duplication, duplication in this study was extreme No significant differences were found between high and low A-scorers nor among the conditions, although the nonanxious group performed slightly better than the anxious group under all three conditions Thus, three published experiments from the Iowa laboratory present data which seem to be at variance with the results reported in two papers from the Johns Hopkins laboratory The present study was designed as a further exploration of the relationship between scores on the Taylor Anxiety Scale and performance on a complex verbal learning task The complex verbal learning task used here differs from previous studies in that the stimulus words were selected from a self-concept scale (below) as indicating either high or low conflict for an individual S The assumption was made that such conflict words would make for a greater level of competing response tendencies than would nonconfiict (neutral) words (4), thereby providing a situation in which, theoretically, differences between high and low anxiety groups should be magnified In order further CORRELATES OF MANIFEST ANXIETY 465 to insure that the selected leaming task would be one of considerable complexity, nonsense syllables of low association value were selected as response words, followmg the procedure reported m earher expenments (9,12) Additionally, there were several methodological elaborations bearing on the use of the A-scale as a selection device One such matter of concern is the fact that to date almost all A scale studies have involved the use of extreme groups Montague (12) reports the results of 5".s m the 80th to 90th percentiles ("an intermediate range") to be indistinguishable from the results of nonanxious 5*5 on all points of his learning curves As a further examination of the sensitivity of the A-scale over the whole range of scores, a middle anxious group (43rd to 56th percentiles) was included in the present experiment Secondly, in the Iowa studies, 5".^ with Lie Scale scores of seven and above were eliminated from experimental consideration ^ It was felt that high Lie scorers may not be responding to the A-scale items objectively In the present study this added selection critenon was not used smce our intention was to utihze Lie Scale data as an integral part of the statistical analysis In fact, since High Lie scorers tend to fall primarily in the low Ascale range, an attempt was made to select a relatively higher proportion of low anxious Ss for purposes of the Lie Scale analysis SUBJECTS Ninety-four freshman men and women were selected from a group of 276 on the basis of performance on the Taylor Mamfest Anxiety Scale (14) ' Three groups were selected High anxietyscores of 27 (90th percentile) and above. Middle anxiety-scores of 12 to 14 (43rd to 56th percentiles), Low anxiety-scores of six (20th percentile) and below 5".…”