European Journal of Personality

Eur. J. Pers. 13: 327±329 (1999)

Book Review

Test anxiety unveiled

Test Anxiety: The State of the Art.

Moshe Zeidner.
Plenum, New York, 1998. 440 ‡ xxi pages.

In a civilization in which any person with a sucient level of intelligence can obtain higher
education, universities have become populated with students who are generally comparable in,
at least, minimal requirements of ability. Yet, success is not guaranteed. Study problems in
areas other than aptitude have recently become important both for students and for student
counsellors: lack of proper study motivation, procrastination of study tasks, and test anxiety
have become major impediments to studying successfully.
As a re¯ection of this shift in problem area, educational psychology has begun to pay wider
attention to individual di€erences among learners with respect to motivational issues. Recently,
Ferrari Johnson and McCown (1995) published a comprehensive monograph on procrastina-
tion, presently followed by Zeidner's scholarly text on test anxiety. According to Zeidner, test
anxiety refers to the individual's disposition to react with extensive worry, intrusive thoughts,
mental disorganisation, tension, and physiological arousal when exposed to evaluative situa-
tions. When experienced at high levels, test anxiety may result in impaired test performance and
psychological distress. Although most people in modern society will experience some degree of
test anxiety, in student populations, for example in college, some 15 to 20 per cent of students
are reported to su€er from relatively high levels of test anxiety.
Test anxiety research has developed in several stages. The ®rst empirical studies, beginning
with the work of Folin, Demis and Smilie in 1914, simply inferred test anxiety from physio-
logical reactions that examinees experienced during ego-threatening exams administered under
evaluative conditions. In 1938, Brown called attention to the seriousness of the problem of test
anxiety for college students, and published a ®rst psychometric scale for identifying high-risk
test-anxious students. The second stage began in the early 1950s, when Mandler and Sarason
initiated a research program into the e€ects of test anxiety on academic performance. They
constructed a ®rst self-report measure of test anxiety, the Test Anxiety Questionnaire, and
demonstrated decrements on learning and ability task performance in highly test-anxious
students. In addition, they identi®ed both a cognitive and an a€ective component in test
anxiety. During the 1960s, further conceptional distinctions were introduced. Spielberger
distinguished state versus trait test anxiety and Alpert and Haber di€erentiated between
facilitating and debilitating test anxiety. The former type of test anxiety was regarded as more
or less bene®cial to academic performance, while the latter type was identi®ed as the more
problematic form of test anxiety. A third distinction was introduced by Liebert and Morris. In
their conceptualization, test anxiety was viewed as a bidimensional phenomenon, including an
empirically distinct, yet correlated, cognitive (worry) and an a€ective (emotionality) compo-
nent. It seemed to be the worry component that related more strongly to test performance than
did emotionality. This distinction shifted test anxiety theory and research toward a more
cognitive orientation, which culminated in the early 1970s in Wine's model to account for the
impact of test anxiety upon performance. According to this `cognitive±attentional or inter-
ference' model, test-anxious persons divide their attention during examinations between task-
relevant activities, on one hand, and task-irrelevant cognitive activities, such as preoccupations

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Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
328 Book Review

with worry, self-criticisms, and somatic concern, on the other. These worry cognitions distract
test-anxious students from the requirements of the task at hand and interfere with the e€ective
use of their time.
In contrast to the uniformity myth, as the author calls it, that test anxiety is a rather homo-
geneous or unidimensional category, the author claims that test anxiety is currently viewed as a
rather complex multidimensional construct, comprised of a cluster of interacting components
and reactions. In addition, it may be best conceptualized as a complex dynamic process,
consisting of a number of distinct temporal phases.
In spite of this, there seems to be little agreement among the experts on test anxiety on the
exact number of components of test anxiety. However, researchers seem to ®nd it useful to
di€erentiate among three kinds of facet, namely (i) cognitive facets (worry, irrelevant thinking),
(ii) a€ective facets (tension, bodily reactions, perceived arousal), and (iii) behavioural facets
(de®cient study skills, procrastination, avoidance behaviour).
A body of research evidence suggests that certain cognitive expressions of anxiety, such as
self-focused attention, cognitive preoccupation with failure (worry), negative thoughts and
doubts about one's competence, feelings of inadequacy in test situations, negative performance
expectations, and ruminations over potential future consequences of failure, may be the most
salient response characteristic of highly test-anxious people to situations in which they are
evaluated.
The a€ective facet of test anxiety consists of both objective somatic symptoms of physio-
logical arousal as well as more subjective manifestations of emotional arousal and tension.
Actual heightened autonomous arousal seems to be the most dominant response mode for the
expression of anxiety under stressful conditions. The symptoms are well known: hands or body
perspiring, heart beating fast, stomach tense, dryness in the mouth, hands or body trembling,
and subjective feelings of stress. These are reactions of the sympathetic nervous system to stress;
they will ready the body for a ®ght/¯ight response. Perceived arousal, on the other hand, is
called emotionality. It is the attention paid to and the interpretation of physiological arousal
and it is triggered by external cues of the evaluation situation, such as walking into the exam-
ination hall, the appearance of the examiner, the distribution of test booklets, and the like. By
contrast, worry cognitions are triggered by cues related to negative appraisals of examination
performance.
There seem to be two key behavioural expressions of test anxiety: de®cient study and test-
taking skills, and procrastination, avoidance, and escape behaviours. Of the former, little is
known, and whether procrastinatory behaviour should be attributed to test anxiety remains to
be seen.
This brings us to aÐminorÐshortcoming of this otherwise so impressive work. Although
clearly conceived as a trait, test anxiety is not related by the author to one of the recently
emerged superstructures of traits, e.g. the Big Five or Eysenck's three. This seems to be an
important omission, because empirically test anxiety seems to be a manifestation of Neuro-
ticism, while on the other hand procrastination is mainly a matter of (low) Conscientiousness
(Schouwenburg and Lay, 1995). This empirical divergence makes procrastination as a beha-
vioural consequence of test anxiety unlikely. On the other hand, by viewing test anxiety as a
subtrait of Neuroticism, a mechanism of test anxiety much simpler than the author advocates
might be conceived. Of course, this would nourish the uniformity myth, so eloquently opposed
by the author. Future developments will probably clear this matter up.
Temporal phases of test anxiety, conceptualized as a dynamic temporal process unfolding
over time, may include four distinct stages. First is the anticipatory stage, consisting of the
preparatory phase prior to an examination. Highly test-anxious students seem to be character-
ized by ine€ectual study, often indulging in self-protective thoughts involving denial, wishful
thinking, and avoidance elements. There is also some research indicating that students report
heightened anxiety in the last few days before a major examination. Second is the confrontation
stage in which there is an actual confrontation with the stressor by taking the examination.
De®ciencies in test-taking study skills, fears about potential failure, and characteristic anxiety
reactions will produce interference and discomfort during testing. Third there will be a waiting
stage in which examinees have already taken the examination, but grades have yet to be
announced, and ®nally there is the outcome stage in which success or failure has occurred.
During each of these phases, anxiety may vary as a function of cognitive appraisals, which, in

Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Pers. 13: 327±329 (1999)
 Book Review 329

turn, vary as a function of the objective properties of the speci®c phase of the test-taking
process.
Consequences of test anxiety for cognitive performance are well documented. Beginning with
the work of Alpert and Haber in the early 1960s, it has been recognized that test anxiety,
although usually impeding cognitive performance, can sometimes enhance it. Thus, both
debilitating and facilitating aspects of test anxiety exist; they seem to vary independently. Such a
joint e€ect of both aspects may be the basis of an often observed curvilinear relationship
between test anxiety and performance. On the whole, however, the massive body of empirical
research points to a modest inverse linear relationship between test anxiety and cognitive
performance (a population correlation of about ÿ0.20). De®cits in information processing may
account for the impaired cognitive performance of test-anxious students. Impaired attention to
novel stimuli, impaired eciency of short-term storage, and interference during information
retrieval may be the mechanisms by which cognitive performance is lowered.
The ®nal chapters of this excellent book deal with a number of suggested modi®cations of the
test situation in order to minimize the achievement-impairing e€ects of test anxiety (chapter 14,
`Optimising procedures'), and the various forms of therapeutic interventions aimed at
alleviating debilitating anxiety (chapter 15) and enhancing test-taking skills (chapter 16). These
are the chapters that are of special relevance to student counsellors. They contain a wealth of
critically evaluated techniques, to be applied both in individual and group treatment.

Henri C. Schouwenburg
Academic Assistance Centre
University of Groningen, The Netherlands

REFERENCES

Ferrari, J. R., Johnson, J. L. and McCown, W. G. (1995). Procrastination and Task Avoidance.
Theory, Research, and Treatment, Plenum, New York.
Schouwenburg, H. C. and Lay, C. H. (1995). `Trait procrastination and the Big-Five factors of
personality', Personality and Individual Di€erences, 18: 481±490.

Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Pers. 13: 327±329 (1999)