E-ISSN : 2733-4538
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of test anxiety and stress on the processing of test-related stimuli. The subjects in this study were sixty university students with high or low test anxiety. In order to manipulate stress experience they received success or failure feedback through a anagram task. Subsequently a modified Stroop task was used to assess the selective processing of test-related stimuli in high and low test-anxious subjects. The results were as follows: High test-anxious subjects were slower in color naming all words than low test-anxious subjects, but anxiety groups x types of words interaction was not significant. Although there was only a nonsignificant tendency of selective processing of test-related stimuli in high test-anxious subjects, these results failed to demonstrate selective processing of test related stimuli in high test-anxious group. And also stress groups x types of words interaction was significant. High stress group subjects were slower in color naming threat words than low stress group subjects: the difference between two groups in color naming positive words and neutral words was not significant. This result suggested that a stressful experience directly primed cognitive representations of threat in memory, and this activation then resulted in selective processing of threat stimuli in the environment.