Altered attentional control process of individuals with high test anxiety: An exploratory fMRI study

Test anxiety (TA) has been linked to abnormalities in attentional control not only for test-related information but also in situations where irrelevant information has to be ignored. However, the neural basis of individuals with high TA (HTA) when exposed to interference from different types of information remains limited. Twenty-two individuals with HTA and twenty-three individuals with low TA (LTA) completed a Stroop task integrating emotional-word and color-word Stroop tasks. Participants were instructed to assess the font color of neutral words, generally threatening words, test-related threatening words, color-congruent words, and color-incongruent words. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were recorded simultaneously as the task was completed. The results indicated that compared with LTA group, HTA group exhibited higher activation in the right postcentral gyrus, left cerebellum, right calcarine gyrus, and left inferior parietal lobule when individuals were exposed to interference by test-related threatening words as opposed to neutral words. However, no clusters with significant group-related differences were found when individuals were exposed to interference by generally threatening words and color-incongruent words. These results suggested that differences in attentional control processes between high- and low-test anxiety groups were mainly limited to test-related threatening stimuli and did not extend to generally threatening and cognitively task-irrelevant stimuli.