Abstract
Test anxiety, anxious thoughts and worries surrounding testing, is a relevant issue for around 20-30% of students today. Different methods have been researched to treat test anxiety, including emotion regulation strategies, one of which is cognitive reappraisal. Personality traits such as neuroticism may make it hard for a person to emotionally regulate, which is why cognitive reappraisal is helpful. A Qualtrics survey was distributed that placed people into 3 experimental groups: positive reappraisal, negative reappraisal, and a control group, and participants were asked to complete a memory test after reappraisal. A One-way ANOVA revealed no significant effect of reappraisal on memory score outcomes. Several things may have impacted this non-significant finding, including floor effects of a too difficult memory test, and insufficient reappraisal measures. Future research should explore cognitive reappraisal in a real-world test taking scenario, and determine how strong cognitive reappraisal manipulation must be to alleviate test anxious feelings.
Keywords: test anxiety, cognitive reappraisal, emotion regulation, neuroticism
Included in
Does Reappraisal of Test Anxiety Improve Performance?
Test anxiety, anxious thoughts and worries surrounding testing, is a relevant issue for around 20-30% of students today. Different methods have been researched to treat test anxiety, including emotion regulation strategies, one of which is cognitive reappraisal. Personality traits such as neuroticism may make it hard for a person to emotionally regulate, which is why cognitive reappraisal is helpful. A Qualtrics survey was distributed that placed people into 3 experimental groups: positive reappraisal, negative reappraisal, and a control group, and participants were asked to complete a memory test after reappraisal. A One-way ANOVA revealed no significant effect of reappraisal on memory score outcomes. Several things may have impacted this non-significant finding, including floor effects of a too difficult memory test, and insufficient reappraisal measures. Future research should explore cognitive reappraisal in a real-world test taking scenario, and determine how strong cognitive reappraisal manipulation must be to alleviate test anxious feelings.
Keywords: test anxiety, cognitive reappraisal, emotion regulation, neuroticism