THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANXIETY, STRESS, AND THE RETRIEVAL OF INFORMATION FROM LONG-TERM MEMORY

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of anxiety, stress, and multiple retrieval trials to student performance on a free recall task. Subjects were 97 undergraduate students in introductory education and psychology courses at Hunter College. Students were identified as either high or low anxious on the basis of their scores on the Test Anxiety Questionnaire (Sarason, 1972). All subjects were trained to a criterion of three errorless repetitions of a list of 20 words, using a free recall paradigm. Number of trials and number of errors to criterion were compared for high and low anxious individuals.;One week later, half of the subjects in each anxiety group were told the task was predictive of general intelligence and academic performance, thus creating stress, and half were not. Subjects were required to list as many of the 20 words as they could recall (in the absence of any feedback) on five successive trials. The number of words recalled at each trial was compared for four groups, which varied in anxiety level and the presence or absence of stress at retrieval.;It had been hypothesized that high anxious students would require more trials and make more errors before achieving the pre-set criterion. Empirical support was obtained for each hypothesis. In addition, it was expected that high anxious subjects who were stressed would experience greater retrieval deficits when compared to any of the other three anxiety groups. Significant main effects were found for stress, along with significant interactions between anxiety level and trials, and between anxiety level, stress condition, and trials.;Explanations for the relationships are offered. Training all subjects to a preset criterion made it possible to actually examine differences in retrieval between the different anxiety groups. When differences in acquisition are controlled for, differences in recall are a function of stress. Moreover, the use of multiple retrieval trials allows for closer inspection of the retrieval process. Results indicate that differences in retrieval between high and low anxious individuals may also be influenced by the lesser ability of the high anxious individual to reconstruct the appropriate retrieval algorithms. Suggestions for future research are made and educational implications are drawn. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).