Enhanced self-affirmation mitigates attentional bias toward test-related threat in youths with elevated test anxiety

We examined the effect of self-affirmation manipulation in mitigating attentional bias toward test-related threat in secondary school students. In two Experiments, youths with high anxiety and the control group were randomized to an enhanced self-affirmation condition or a no self-affirmation condition, following which they completed an Emotional Stroop task of test-related threat words and test-unrelated neutral words as a measure of attentional bias. A pilot experiment was conducted in 85 11-to-18-year-old youths (43 high test anxiety, 42 low test anxiety) and showed the self-affirmation decreased the response time for both groups. In the main experiment, we recruited a new group of 118 11-to-18-year-old youths (59 high test anxiety, 59 low test anxiety). We used a novel, modified Emotional Stroop task by including a performance comparison condition (upward performance comparison & average performance comparison). Highly test-anxious youths with no self-affirmation showed an attentional bias toward test-related threat (i.e., prolonged RT toward threat vs. neutral words) in the upward comparison trials, whereas high test-anxiety youths with enhanced self-affirmation did not exhibit an attentional bias in the upward comparison trials. We provide novel evidence on the effect of enhanced self-affirmation in mitigating attentional bias toward test-related threat in high test-anxiety youths. Enhancing self-affirmation may be a useful tool to ameliorate attentional bias toward threat in high test-anxiety youths, as a potential alternative to the attentional bias modification technique.