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Related Experiment Videos

Effects of anxiety on inferential reasoning task performance.

S Darke1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|September 1, 1988
PubMed
Summary

High anxiety impairs cognitive tasks requiring working memory but not automatic processes. This suggests anxiety

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Anxiety is known to affect cognitive performance.
  • The specific mechanisms by which anxiety impacts different types of cognitive tasks are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of anxiety on inference construction.
  • To differentiate the effects of anxiety on automatic versus capacity-demanding cognitive processes.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments were conducted with participants categorized as high or low anxiety.
  • Participants were tasked with constructing inferences, including necessary anaphoric relations and verification of unnecessary inferences.
  • Performance was measured based on accuracy and/or speed.

Main Results:

  • No performance deficits related to anxiety were observed when inferring necessary anaphoric relations (automatic process).
  • Significant performance deficits related to anxiety were found in Experiments 2 and 3, involving the verification of unnecessary inferences (capacity-demanding task).

Conclusions:

  • Anxiety-related performance deficits are specific to cognitive tasks that heavily utilize the working memory system.
  • These findings support a working memory-based account of how anxiety affects cognitive performance, particularly in capacity-demanding situations.

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