Inhibitory Control Deficit And Mindfulness Intervention In Test Anxiety

The 14th Five-Year Plan emphasized the importance of "improving mental health and mental health service system" in the outline of "Make all-round efforts to build a Healthy China".Test anxiety is one of the main risk factors that impairs mental health.A meta-analysis examined the prevalence of test anxiety among Chinese students and found that the 23% of high school students reported that had different levels of test anxiety,furthermore the levels of test anxiety rising with age and declining slightly in college.Test anxiety is an emotional response from the perspective of cognition and emotion,that is,when individual intelligence,social ability,motivation and learning ability could not meet the requirements of the test situation,test anxiety would be induced.There are high and low levels of test anxiety.Moderate test anxiety is beneficial to stimulate individual learning motivation and promote academic performance,while high test anxiety impairs individuals’ ability to inhibit and control irrelevant stimuli,thus affect their academic performance and learning motivation.So there is an urgent need to develop intervention aimed at relieving the negative effect of test anxiety.Mindfulness is an emerging intervention that emphasizes acceptance and non-judgment.Mindfulness practice itself does not alleviate test anxiety.In fact,mindfulness practice can help us understand test anxiety and our physical feelings,and then accept these feelings and emotions,so as to reduce the energy and time spent on emotional control,thus reducing negative influence of test anxiety.Most existing studies have found that mindfulness training can significantly improve the emotional regulation ability and inhibitory control ability of individuals,but few studies have also found that mindful coloring and mindful yoga can not significantly relieve test anxiety.This paper consists of 4 studies.Firstly,we explored specific test anxiety classes through the latent profile analysis.Then,we explored the inhibitory control characteristics across the three classes.Further,we explored the influence of mindfulness practice on the inhibitory control and anxiety through a meta-analysis.Finally,we developed a 5-week mindfulness training course based on the existing mindfulness intervention programs,and exploring the impact of mindfulness training on inhibitory control of individuals with high test anxiety.Study 1(N=410)exploring different dimensions of test anxiety through the latent profile analysis in Chinese high school students,and findings found three classes: the high emotionality and high cognition class(14%,N=59),the students in this class are characteristic of higher scores on four dimensions of test anxiety questionnaire than the other two classes;the medium levels of test anxiety(45%,N=187),the students in this class are characteristic of middle scores;and the low test anxiety class(41%,N=174)respectively,this class was characterized by lower scores on the four dimensions of test anxiety questionnaire than the other two classes.Furthermore,this study explored the differences in mindfulness and self-compassion across the three classes.The results indicated that comparing to the low and middle test anxiety students,the high emotionality and high cognition students had lower levels of mindfulness and self-compassion,while higher levels of self-coldness.Study 2(N=304)adopts the emotional Stroop paradigm to explore the inhibition control characteristics of individuals in each profile under both the above and below threshold conditions.In the sub-threshold Stroop task,there was no significant difference in accuracy and response time among the three profiles.In the Stroop task,there was no significant difference in response time to neutral stimuli in the low,medium and the high emotionality and high cognition groups.In terms of the response times to test-related threat stimuli,there was no significant difference between the mediate test anxiety group and the high emotionality and high cognition group,which were 472.266 and 475.399,respectively,while the response times of low test anxiety group was significantly lower than the mediate test anxiety group and the high emotionality and high cognition group.In terms of the accuracy of neutral stimuli,results indicated that there were no significant difference among these groups.In terms of the accuracy of test-related threat stimuli,the accuracy of the high test anxiety group was significantly lower than that of the low test anxiety group and the mediate test anxiety group.There was no significant difference in the accuracy between the low test anxiety group and the medium test anxiety group.Study 3 explored the influence of mindfulness training on inhibitory control and emotion of individuals with test anxiety through a meta-analysis.We retrieved literatures in Pubmed、ERIC、Psyc INFO、Academic Search Complete、Psyc ARTICLES、Proquest Dissertations and Theses、Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials and MEDLINE.The search strategy is mindful* AND(“test anxiety”OR “exam* anxiety” OR “eval* anxiety”),we retrieved 15629 studies and screened literature from title,abstract to full article.Finally,15 studies were included in meta analysis.The results showed that mindfulness training could improve the emotional regulation and reduce test anxiety,but could not effectively improve the inhibitory control function.Study 4 combining with the existing mindfulness intervention programs and the characteristics of Chinese youth development,this paper proposes a 5-week mindfulness intervention.Then,investigate the influence of mindfulness training on test anxiety,self-compassion and inhibitory control of individuals with high test anxiety.The questionnaire study found that mindfulness training improved the levels of mindfulness and self-compassion and reduced self-reported test anxiety.The results of emotional Stroop showed that,compared with the control group,mindfulness training significantly improved the inhibitory control ability of individuals with test anxiety,which was reflected in the significantly reduced response times to the test-related stimuli.In conclusion,individuals with high emotionality and high cognition have inhibitory control defects on test-related stimuli in the Stroop task,while there is no significant difference in inhibitory control ability across the test anxiety classes in the sub-threshold Stroop task.At the same time,brief mindfulness exercises,such as mindful breathing exercises,could not significantly improve the inhibition control ability of anxious individuals.Therefore,we proposed a personalized mindfulness practice based on the existing mindfulness intervention programs and the developmental characteristics of adolescents.The results showed that 5 weeks of mindfulness practice significantly improved the inhibition control ability and reduced anxiety of individuals with high emotionality and high cognition compared with the control group.