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Updated: May 16, 2025

Reducing State Anxiety Using Working Memory Maintenance
Published on: July 19, 2017
An experimental study of the effect of anxiety on lexical processing of college students: evidence from true-false
Zhang Huiyong1,2,3,4, Pu Xinping2,3,4
1Student Mental Health Education Center of Tiangong University, Tianjin, China.
Introduction:
This study examined the effect of anxiety on lexical processing among college students with anxiety in China.
Methods:
We conducted two experiments in a stressful environment to induce anxiety. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of anxiety on lexical processing through a true-false word judgment task, while Experiment 2 further explored this effect using a semantic category judgment task.
Results:
Both experiments revealed no significant difference in the accuracy of lexical judgments between participants with high and low anxiety. However, there was a notable difference in the reaction times for lexical judgments, with high-anxiety participants exhibiting longer reaction time compared to their low-anxiety counterparts. This indicates a decrease in the efficiency of lexical processing among those with high anxiety.
Conclusion:
This study confirms that anxiety diminishes lexical processing efficiency without affecting lexical judgment performance. These findings support the processing efficiency theory.
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