Test Anxiety, Worry, and Cognitive Interference

Abstract

Most writers agree that anxiety is important aspect of human life, but there is wide disagreement about its definition. Typically it is discussed as being such a complex experience as to make scientific investigation difficult or impossible. If there were such a thing, perhaps the modal definition of anxiety would be in terms of unpleasant emotional state or condition marked by apprehension. Spielberger (1972) defined anxiety as an unpleasant emotional state or condition which is characterized by subjective feelings of tension, apprehension, and worry, and by activation or arousal of the autonomic nervous (p. 482). More recently, Leary (1982) offered this definition of anxiety: Anxiety refers to a cognitive-affective response characterized by physiological arousal (indicative of sympathetic nervous system activation) and apprehension regarding a potentially negati\·e outcome that the individual perceives as impending. (p. 99). The problem is that many of the terms in these definitions have low inter-writer reliability. For example, how much agreement is there about what emotional or affective state is; what objective feelings of tension are; and what the referents are for the concepts of activation and arousal?

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