Test anxiety, input modality, and levels of organization in free recall

Abstract

Subjects performed for five trials on a free recall list containing both rhyming word pairs and word-associate pairs, with either visual or auditory presentation. High-anxiety subjects recalled and clustered less than low-anxiety subjects for both rhymes and associates. There was little effect due to input modality, nor did modality interact with anxiety.Recent research has shown that high-anxiety subjects do not perform as well as low-anxiety subjects in free recall (cf. Mueller, 1976). Specifically, although highanxiety subjects may recall as many words, their recall is less organized; for example, there is less clustering of words in terms of intralist relationships such as taxonomic category membership. One interpretation of this deficit is that high-anxiety subjects engage in a more restricted encoding of the items, and thus are less able to utilize various word features to advantage in organizing material in memory.A question of interest concerns the generality of this cue utilization deficit. It has been observed (Broadbent, 1971;Schwartz, 1975) that states of high arousal seem to orient the subject's attention to the physical characteristics of linguistic materials, at the expense of semantic content. One way to conceptualize this is in terms of the depth-of-processing analysis (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). This view assumes that "shallow" processing of a word involves attending to physical features, that is, its orthography or sound, with the result being an unstable or transitory memory trace. "Deep" processing is said to occur when semantic content is examined, and it results in a stronger memory trace. One hypothesis, then, might be that high-anxiety subjects have a deficit in processing deep (semantic) features, but no deficit in terms of processing shallow (physical) attributes. While arousal and anxiety may not be identical, the arousal results noted above are consistent with this interpretation.A test of this hypothesis should be possible in free recall, given that the word list involves both shallow and deep dimensions for organization. The present experiment used a list construction with both rhyming (shallow) and word-associate ( deep) relationships in the same list (cf. Dolinsky, 1972). With such a list, subjects can cluster their recall by associates, rhymes, or both. The anxiety-depth hypothesis suggests that high-anxiety subjects would show a deficit in terms of associative organization, as has been found previously, but no deficit should be observed for acoustic organization. As a methodological point, the method of list presentation was either visual or auditory, to determine whether this had any effect on the perception of the presence of the acoustic relationships. METHOD Subjects and DesignSixty-four students in introductory psychology courses were selected on the basis of test anxiety scores (Sarason, 1972). High-anxiety subjects had scores greater than 19 (mean = 28.1), and low-anxiety subjects had scores below 10 (mean = 7.2). The basic design was a 2 by 2 factorial for test anxiety (h...

Individual differences in verbal memory performance: A test of alternative information-processing models.

“…This is because in the structural model that was accepted as plausible, an increase in processing intensity is associated with an increase in recall from LTS. The usual expectation is that free-recall memory performance should be retarded by high anxiety (Mueller, 1977;Zubrzycki & Borkowski, 1973) or that anxiety should be unrelated to memory performance because of an accompanying increase in effort that could largely offset any deleterious effects (Eysenck, 1979).…”

Emotion and Rationality: A Critical Review and Interpretation of Empirical Evidence

“…This decrement in processing capacity has a variety of consequences that seem detrimental to sound reasoning. For example, compared to nonanxious participants, anxious participants tend to (a) have lower ability to recall information and organize this information in memory (Mueller, 1977, 1978), (b) take longer to verify the validity of logical inferences (Darke, 1988b), (c) scan alternatives in a more haphazard fashion (Keinan, 1987), (d) select an option without considering every alternative (Keinan, 1987), (e) commit more errors in geometric and semantic analogical problems (Keinan, 1987; Leon & Revelle, 1985), and (f) process persuasion arguments less thoroughly (Sanbonmatsu & Kardes, 1988, but see Pham, 1996). Intense emotional states, such as anxiety, therefore appear to produce deficits in people's reasoning abilities.…”

Associations between evaluation anxiety, cognitive interference and performance on working memory tasks

“…Many researchers have demonstrated that evaluation anxiety is inversely associated with cognitive performance on tasks such as analogies (Deffenbacher, 1977), verbal memory (Mueller, 1977;Sarason & Stoops, 1978) and problem solving (Greene, 1985). Hembree (1988) conducted a meta-analysis that synthesized the results of 562 studies examining the association between evaluation anxiety (termed test anxiety) and measures of cognitive performance.…”