The relationship of anxiety level to performance in serial learning.

Anxiety in Secondary Modern and Grammar School Children

“…In more complex learning tasks, where there are several competing responses, the advantage will be with the low anxiety group. The prediction has veen verified in experiments with adults using both classical conditioning (Taylor, 1951 ;Spence and Taylor, 195 1 ;Spence and Farber, 1953) and more complex forms of learning (Taylor and Spence, 1952 ;Farber and Spence, 1953 , Montague, 1953 ;Spence, Farber and McFann, 1956 If the theory is extrapolated to apply to grammar and secondary modern school groups, the prediction will presumably be that, since academic learning is a complex matter at which grammar school children meet with greater success, grammar school children will have a lower level of anxiety than secondarv modern school children. This prediction directly opposes that made from Davis's theory and runs counter to Bene's findings, unless the two theories are concerned with different kinds of anxiety.…”

Threat, Anxiety, and Reading Behavior

“…Farber (4) explains that anxious subjects perform more poorly in dis c r i minant learning situations because the habit strength for errors is greater than t hat for correct response. Hilgard (6,7), however , believes that the anxious are more sensitive than the less anxious and thus would learn to avoid a threatening stimulus requiring no discrimination, whereas they would learn a v e r b al series (9) or a maze (3) more poorly because both of these require discriminations. The study of Deese and others (2) confirms the finding that anxious subjects under pain motivation perform better than non-anxious subjects and better than unshocked anxious subjects.…”

“…Threat was stated in terms of placing one ' s academic s tat u s in jeopardy (1) . Taylor and Spence (9) demonstrated that anxious people perform more poorly than less anxious students in learning tasks involving discriminations. Farber (4) explains that anxious subjects perform more poorly in dis c r i minant learning situations because the habit strength for errors is greater than t hat for correct response.…”

Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Military Testing Association (19th), 17-21 October 1977, San Antonio, Texas

“…Where short-term memory and the learning of discriminations involving very similar items constitute the task, the effects of anxiety could be disruptive ac shs-I by Taylor and Spence (1952) and Ramond (1953) in serial, verbal learning tasks. For anxiety to have a differential effect in the racial groups, the anxiety induced by the test conditions would have to be greater for the nonwhite group.…”