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

Abstract

The effects of word-position and stress-nonstress experimental conditions on performance in serial-verbal learning were investigated for high-(HA) and low-(LA) anxiety college males. The same 12syllable CVC list (42.7% Glaze association value) was learned by Ss in Neutral and Stress conditions; in the latter, Ss were told "speed of learning is strongly related to intelligence."Significant differences were found only in the Stress condition in which the performance of HA Ss was inferior to that of LA Ss early in learning, and superior later in learning. For words at the extremes of the serial list, the performance of HA Ss exceeded that of LA Ss at an earlier stage in learning than for words embedded in the list. It was concluded that the effects of anxiety on serial learning depend upon experimental stress, characteristics of stimulus materials, serial-position phenomena and, in some cases, on individual differences in intelligence.According to Spence's (1958) theory of emotionally based drive, noxious or aversive stimuli arouse a hypothetical emotional response, r e , and drive level, D, is a function of the strength of this response. The Taylor (1953) Manifest Anxiety scale (MA scale) was developed as an operational measure of individual differences in r e , and the construct validity of the MA scale as an index of D has been consistently demonstrated in classical defense conditioning experiments (Spence, 1964).Complex learning tasks typically do not involve noxious stimuli, and evidence bearing on whether or not 5s

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