Personality Variables in Levels of Predicted and Actual Test Anxiety among College Students

Anxiety is widely recognized as a significant contributor to performance in both sport (Cox, 1994; Hanin, 1986; Raglin, 1992) and academic (Anson, Berstein & Hobfoll, 1984; Poorman & Martin, 1991; Godbey & Courage 1994; Grinnell & Kyte, 1979; Hojat, Robeson, Damjanov, Veloski, Glaser & Gonnella, 1993) settings, and the most popular explanation for this relationship is derived from the inverted-U hypothesis (Cox,1994; Landers,1980). Based on the work of Yerkes and Dodson (1908) the original intent of this paradigm was to describe the relationship between stimulus activation and avoidance learning in mice. Over trials in which the difficulty of the learning task was progressively increased, Yerkes and Dodson found an inverse relationship existed between learning difficulty and the strength of the stimulus, in this case an electric shock. When Yerkes and Dodson plotted performance against stimulus strength, a curvilinear function in the shape of an inverted-U was described. However, despite the original aim of Yerkes and Dodson's work, the inverted-U hypothesis has more typically been tested in terms of anxiety rather than stimulus activation (Raglin, 1992). As applied to anxiety and performance, the inverted-U hypothesis commonly predicts that as anxiety increases from low to moderate levels there is an associated improvement in performance. However, performance decrements will occur if anxiety levels either exceed or fall below this moderate range (Cox, 1994). Furthermore, in the case of sport performance, the optimal range of anxiety is considered to vary as a result of the task involved (Oxendine, 1970). Hence, when performance is plotted against anxiety, a curvilinear function in the shape of an inverted-U is again depicted. Despite the widespread acceptance of the inverted-U hypothesis, experimental support for its relationship of anxiety to athletic performance is sparse (Morgan & Ellickson, 1988; Neiss, 1988; Raglin, 1992), and empirical evidence supporting the validity of the inverted-U hypothesis to academic test performance has proven inconclusive (Munz, Cosetllo & Korabik, 1975). Moreover, the work of Yerkes and Dodson has been misinterpreted in many introductory psychology textbooks, which have mistakenly focused on the effects of anxiety on motor learning and not performance (Morgan & Ellickson, 1987; Winton, 1987) More problematic is the application of the inverted-U hypothesis to levels of performance resulting from methodological concerns and data analysis. A comprehensive review of literature (Martens, 1971) found that a host of studies utilizing the inverted-U hypothesis had done so as a post-hoc explanation of results already obtained. In other words, the inverted-U hypothesis has been applied to data, with findings made to "fit" the inverted-U distribution (Neiss, 1988). Such treatment has allowed essentially all possible experimental findings to be interpreted through this hypothesis, a practice which would appear to lessen the empirical value of this approach (Smith, Burwitz & Jakeman, 1988). Moreover, the inverted-U hypothesis has typically arrived at the conjecture of moderate anxiety as optimal through averaging scores of groups of individuals, rather than plotting individual scores of anxiety against performance (Raglin, 1992). Hence, through this methodology when the mean is derived, it has naturally reflected the middle or moderate range across samples. As a result, the inverted-U hypothesis tends to minimize or negate individual differences in the anxiety performance relationship through its focus on group averages. While it may well be true that the average score for groups of individuals is moderate, it should not be implied that the optimal level of anxiety for each individual is moderate as well (Neiss, 1988; Raglin, 1992). In contrast, Hanin (1986) has proposed an alternative model of the relationship of anxiety to athletic performance in which emphasis is placed on individual differences. …