The effects of anxiety on verbal and spatial task performance

The hypothesis that under ego-threatening conditions highly anxious subjects will be detrimentally affected in verbal reasoning tasks, but not in spatial reasoning tasks, was investigated. The performance of high and low anxiety subjects on two verbal and two visuo-spatial tasks were compared. The verbal and spatial reasoning tasks required manipulation of information, while the other two tasks were measures of verbal and spatial memory span. An anxiety-related deficit was found on the more difficult verbal reasoning items, but there were no other performance deficits on reasoning tasks. Anxiety did not affect performance on either memory span task. The results are consistent with the view that anxiety acts as a secondary verbal task, interfering with those verbal tasks that make heavy demands on working memory.