[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Testing Anxiety
In this report I have discussed the testing anxiety and its phenomenological measures that indicate what an individual is willing to divulge about feelings of anxiety. These measures, taken in conjunction with performance measures, provide information that is needed to construct and evaluate programs designed to reduce anxiety or its undesirable effects. Also I have discussed physiological measures that do not appear to be systematically related to other anxiety phenomena and they are extremely difficult to obtain reliably. However, knowledge of possible physiological concommitants of anxiety has been of value in the designing of therapeutic programs that enable persons to deal with their feelings of anxiety. Furthermore I have discussed task-performance measures that obtained on carefully designed problems provide the context for studying the effects of anxiety on performance and for determining what modification in instructional procedure will reduce anxiety or its undesirable effects. As such, this approach to defining anxiety has formed the cornerstone of the current effort.
Anxiety has a bad name. No one wants to be anxious; parents try not to raise anxious children; teachers are warned against arousing anxiety; psychotherapists are well paid for their efforts to alleviate irrational fear; and millions of tranquilizers are consumed each day to reduce tension and anxiety. Yet, from an evolutionary viewpoint, anxiety must have some functional value for it to have evolved as an inherent response potential in the human species.
Methodological Problems:
Certainly one problem area in the test of any theory is that of measurement. The differentiation of trait and state anxiety is an important step forward, but each of these concepts would seem to need further differentiation. For example, trait anxiety is defined in terms of the disposition "to perceive a wide range of stimulus situations as dangerous or threatening and to respond to such threats with high state anxiety."....................
