The Effects Of Threat-related Stimulus On Mechanisms Of Attentional Control In Test-anxious Students

A significant proportion of the students suffered from test anxiety (TA), a disturbance which stems from worry about potential failure in an evaluative situation.This research focuses on whether the vulnerability to negative thoughts in test-anxious students should be attributed to the deficits in self-regulation. Specifically, the current study investigated whether TA is characterized primarily by deficient attentional control.Considering that the mechanisms of coping with threat via attentional control in test-anxious students remain unclear up to now, we present data in the current study which compares the impact on attentional control by threat-related stimuli between high and low test-anxious, more specifically, worried students.The first part investigates whether threat-related stimulus intrudes into the arena of conscious awareness in test-anxious students by impairing attentional control function via an emotional RSVP paradigm. The results suggest that threat- and test-related target, which might increase motivation to apply attentional control mechanisms, can more easily break into the current area of consciousness in TA students in the low-load condition, and impairs the subsequent processing. However, the privileged threat processing diminishes by the increased T1 load in test-anxious students. In contrast, when threat- and test-related words are introduced as distractions (which might result in low motivation to apply attentional control mechanisms) adjacent to T2 in the AB period, the interference effect has no difference between high- and- low anxious students.The second part investigates whether threat-related stimulus could impair executive attention via an emotional ANT paradigm, which is devised to evaluate the efficiency of different attention systems in a single task. The results suggest that the executive attention is impaired when threat-related words are embedded in centrally presented hollow arrows. The situation-related deficit will recover when there is no threat in the situation.The third part merges VSTM and emotional stroop tasks into one task, in order to investigate the effect of cognitive resources on attentional control function. The expense of cognitive resources is operated by varying task load, duration of the items, and valence of the words which are embedded in the colored patches. The results suggest that the allocation of attentional resources relies on the supplementary of the resources. Test-anxious students whose cognitive load is generated yet still limited, are easier to get emotional disturbance,specifically, threat- and test-related interference, which is task-irrelevant than controls. By contrast, there is no difference between test-anxious students and controls when cognitive load is high and hardly available (overloaded).The fourth part aims at the cognitive reason underlying the differences on attentional processing between high and low test-anxious students. The words varying characteristics of emotion are evaluated on their values on threat and exam relevance. The result shows that the threat scores of the words labeled as "threat-related" are higher in test-anxious students compared to controls.In conclusion, we find that the negative intrusive thoughts in test-anxious students are related to the impaired attentional control function. However,the impairment stems only from situations which contain threat-related information, and is affected by the motivation and the strategy on applying attentional control mechanisms. Under situational pressures which vary in the threat level for the environment, supplementary level of the resources and processing time, test-anxious students might employ different regulatory strategy. They are disturbed more by threat- and test-related information under the conditions in which cognitive load is generated yet still limited.Exaggeration of the potential threat in the situation could be a reason for the cognitive differences between test-anxious students and controls.This research suggests that the views on attention deficits and inflexible attention regulation in test-anxious students just reflect the characteristics of cognitive processing which are particular to one situation. The current study supports, in general, the attentional control theory which claims that anxious individuals could show more flexibility in attentional regulations, and adds to our knowledge of the strategy on emotional attention in test-anxious students who are confronted with a threatening situation.