Anxiety, Stress, and Contingent Negative Variation Reconsidered

Neuroticism-Anxiety, Impulsive-Sensation Seeking and autonomic responses to somatosensory stimuli

“…This finding is, again, in accord with previous findings reported by Neary and Zuckerman (1976) who, likewise, observed that SRCs to novel stimuli were larger in low-anxiety compared to high-anxiety participants while groups did not differ in basal SCLs. These findings rule out a common misconception assuming that orienting represents an emotional response to the eliciting stimulus rather than a perceptual alerting response and are consistent with other studies relating anxiety and ego-involvement to responsiveness (Roessler, 1973;Van Veen et al, 1973;Glanzmann and Froehlich, 1984).…”

Anticipatory processes under academic stress: An ERP study

“…Most interestingly, there was no such correlation in the exam group. The literature has reported the individual difference of trait anxiety in the relationship between CNV amplitude and state anxiety (Glanzmann & Froehlich, 1984;Knott & Irwin, 1967;Knott & Irwin, 1968;Knott & Irwin, 1973;McCallum & Papakostopoulos, 1973;Van Veen et al, 1973). Both the ceiling hypothesis (Knott & Irwin, 1967) and the distraction hypothesis (Tecce, 1971;Tecce, 1972) have been proposed for these results.…”

“…The results of a study by Siniatchkin et al (2006) also showed that healthy women under experimental achievement stress had increased iCNV amplitude compared with those under control conditions. More interestingly, studies found that high-trait anxious individuals had a greater CNV than lowtrait anxious individuals who performed at comparable levels (Ansari & Derakshan, 2011;Glanzmann & Froehlich, 1984). They explained that anxious individuals use more processing resources to prevent decrements in performance at the expense of processing efficiency (Ansari & Derakshan, 2011).…”

“…Similarly, McCallum and Papakostopoulos (1973) found that as a function of increasing task complexity, CNV increases in low-anxiety subjects and decreases in high-anxiety subjects. Glanzmann and Froehlich (1984) also suggested that the reduction of CNV is associated with an increase of state anxiety in high-anxiety subjects; no such relationship is found in low anxiety subjects. There have been two interpretations suggested for these results.…”

“…They explained that anxious individuals use more processing resources to prevent decrements in performance at the expense of processing efficiency (Ansari & Derakshan, 2011). These studies utilized laboratory-induced acute stress/anxiety (Glanzmann & Froehlich, 1984;Siniatchkin et al, 2006) or specific anxiety population samples (Ansari & Derakshan, 2011), and relatively little is known about how natural, long-term psychosocial stressors modulate the anticipation step of information processing, as indexed by CNV.…”