The role of anxiety in serial rote learning.

Abstract

Assuming that anxiety, as drive, combines multiplicatively with habit strength to increase the difference between stronger and weaker response tendencies in a learning situation, independent groups of anxious and nonanxious human subjects were given 3 serial rote learning tasks of graduated complexity. Complexity of the task was varied by the manipulation of intralist similarity and association value of the items used. Anxious subjects performed less well than nonanxious subjects on the difficult tasks with many incorrect tendencies, showed greater relative improvement on a task of medium complexity and surpassed nonanxious subjects on the simplest task. Dominant tendencies, whether correct or incorrect, appeared to be augmented by anxiety.