EFFECTS OF ANXIETY ON ATTENTION-BASED TASKS IN A COLLEGE POPULATION

Abstract

We explored how anxiety may impact performance on two attention-based tasks, the Navon and Stroop tasks. Previous literature has illustrated that trait anxiety may lead to diminishing global processing and, therefore, a local processing bias (Basso et al., 1996). Which may contribute to narrowing the scope of one’s attention, impairing cognitive flexibility (Derryberry & Reed, 1998; Najmi et al., 2012). Additionally, there is conflicting data on how anxiety interacts with performance on the Stroop task (Pacheco-Unguetti et al., 2010; Ursache & Cybele Raver, 2014). We conducted two t-tests analyzing high and low anxiety groups’ performance on the Navon task. We also conducted an ANOVA analyzing three groups’ performance on the Stroop task. We did not find any statistically significant differences in the performance on the Stroop and Navon task between groups of high anxiety and low anxiety.