Analyzing The Association Between The Emotional Stroop With Trait And State Anxiety

Anxiety affects the entire person. It affects the physiological, behavioral and psychologically. Physiological anxiety include body reactions like rapid heartbeat, muscle tension, queasiness, dry mouth and sweating. Behavioral it can interfere with the ability to act, express yourself or handle everyday situations. Psychologically anxiety causes apprehension and uneasiness. It can cause one to feel detached from one’s body or fearful of dying or going crazy. Criteria must be met are 1. Symptoms must interfere with important areas of functioning or cause marked distress. 2. Symptoms are not caused by a drug or a medical condition. 3. The fears and anxieties are distinct from the symptoms of another anxiety disorder (Kring, p. 174).

Today anxiety disorders are recognized as one of the most common mental health disorders. Anxiety has been around since human’s worried about being eaten by saber tooth tigers. “It’s important to note that at its core level, anxiety is a part of evolution. Anxiety is the activation of the fight or flight system the system your body uses to keep you safe from harm (Calm Clinic)”. Oddly, anxiety is a normal part of life; you may feel anxious when having to make a significant decision or taking a test, for most people these normal feelings usually fade, however for those who suffer from an anxiety disorder, these feels never subsides. They can cause such distress that it interferes with an individual’s ability to lead a normal healthy life.

To address this phenomenon, researchers have proposed different theories of test anxiety to account for the effects of test anxiety on the deficits of academic performance. According to scholars such as Schmidt and Riniolo (1999), the cognitive aspects of test anxiety - worry and task-relevant thinking - are also present in social anxiety. Therefore, students who experience test anxiety may also suffer from other types of psychological and cognitive problems such as self-esteem, cognitive development, social skills and memory. Essentially, the students who suffer from test anxiety are individuals who are unable to cope with any types of stress. Considering the stressful nature of

The Stroop effect was tested on four different tasks. Nineteen Queens College students were recruited by flyer, and each were assigned to a word reading task, color reading task, color inhibition task, and word inhibition task. They were timed using a stopwatch function on a cell phone, to name the color, or word to the quickest of their ability. In the order from longest reaction time to shortest: inhibition color naming task, color naming task, inhibition word reading, and word reading. This study shows that people can read words more quickly than they can name colors, and that inhibiting an automatic response to color/word tasks will take longer to do than tasks that do not involve inhibition.

Anxiety is experienced by most people on a daily basis. Many times, anxiety can prevent people from accomplishing amazing tasks in their life. In some cases, people who avoid the anxiety end up experiencing some sort of sadness. In a short essay, called “Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name” by James Lincoln Collier, the author explains what causes these anxieties, and how to overcome them.

d. What was measured? What were the variables? – The English Worry and Anxiety Questionnaire measured general anxiety disorder symptoms. A high score represented more symptoms. The Penn State Worry Questionnaire measured the severity of trait worrying. The higher the score the more severe. The English Why Worry II measured the correlation of positive beliefs and worry. A high score indicated stronger beliefs in positive correlation. A subscale was also implemented to measure worry aids, worry motivates, worry protects from negative emotions after negative events, the act of worrying prevents negative events, being a high worrier is a good personality trait. The Metacognitions Questionnaire measured beliefs regarding worry, memory and thought awareness. It also consisted of five subscales that measured: positive beliefs,

Science with all its marvels and wonders continues to press forward making extraordinary breakthroughs. Psychology plays a key role in many of sciences steps forward, each branch of psychology focusing on a specific techniques and theories. In the document the center of attention is surrounding the application of clinical psychology, this branch of psychology is unique as it all realms of an individual’s issue. Specifically speaking, anxiety is the psychological disorder that is under review through the processes of a clinical

This text proposes to display the results of a study that was conducted by selecting a random sampling of students. Information was gathered and scored about their study habits and their anxiety levels at exam time. The goal was to determine whether or not there was a significant level of correlation between the numbers of hours that students studied in relation to the level of anxiety that the students experienced at exam time. As researchers the aim was to disprove the null hypothesis that states there is no correlation between the two variables and to prove the alternate hypothesis that states that the anxiety at exam time is directly

Analyses of the behavioral and the ERP data pointed to some inconsistent findings. The behavioral data shows significant adaptation in both conditions but stronger adaptation in the single trials than the double trials. This might be attributed to the position of the adaptor and target (both appearing in the center of the screen), to using a single valence for each trial and to the exceedingly apparent identity congruence that resulted in an overlap effect. The less robustness of the effect in the double adaptation condition may be attributed to the peculiar fear-neutral adaptors having two different types of valences and which were shown at the same time. The presence of these seemingly unusual trials could have compromised the overall effect

While taking this exam, I assumed that because their was a correlation between cognitive anxiety and somatic anxiety that it would be positive. One can argue that there is more of a direct relationship between both cognitive and somatic anxiety since they can influence one another. However, the book directly states that “people with high trait anxiety usually have more state anxiety in highly competitive, evaluative situations than do people with lower trait anxiety. Ref. Ch. 4 pg.

To view the influence of negative valence on performance, the emotional Stroop task has been utilised (Itkes & Mashal, 2015). The Stroop task involves participants naming colours of words whilst disregarding their background. The words used generally bear negative or neutral valence, and results propose that reaction times are slower to negative words in comparison to neutral words. (Itkes & Mashal, 2015) suggest that achievements on this role show a basic deceleration resulting from dangerous stimuli.

The Emotional Stroop task is one of the most common experiments used in psychology to investigate emotions, where the participants of the study need to recognize the colors in which provided words are printed. During the time spent reading provided those words, participants of the study might focus on the word itself not to the color they need to detect. This is not valid test for the experiment itself, because if unconsciously focusing on the word instead of the color may trigger some processes which are not specifically connected to the color (Williams, Mathews, MacLeod 1996).

The items of the BAI were drawn from three earlier self-report instruments that measured various aspects of anxiety. The BAI was developed with adult psychiatric outpatients and the manual recommends using caution with other clinical populations.

Another prominent bias characterizing anxiety is in interpretation or processing of the uncertain and the unknown. We encounter ambiguous situations in our life daily, but what differs is our subjective interpretation and processing of that situation. Anxious individuals find themselves to be uneasy all the time, the main culprits being their thoughts and perceptions about themselves and the world, which are revealed by the way they process and resolve ambiguity. In an ambiguous situation, processing in anxiety could be mood-congruent or context-related (Richards, Holmes, Pell & Bethell, 2013). Bower (1981) and Blanchette, Richards and Cross, (2007) have found evidence for mood congruent hypothesis whereas evidence to support a context effect

Anxiety is termed as a number of complicated negative thoughts such as fear, worryness, and apprehension. Individuals are capable to sense and feel the presence of anxiety in numerous situations connected to their culture and community. In addition, scholars attempted to find out the nature of anxiety from different perspectives. Spielberger and Rickman (1990) read about anxiety, depending on the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud, saying that anxiety is a nasty sensational state that is followed by the worriness and apprehension. However, too many authors have studied anxiety in regard to psychological or personal theory to learning and perceiving (Spielberg, 1966 a).in the beginning of the 1960s, the two ideas which are the state of being anxious and trait, were introduced by the two authors (ahell and scheier 1961) . The features of the anxiety condition are closely