1954/12/01 by Walter M. Gordon, D. E. Berlyne · 18 citations
Medicine · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Anxiety #Audiology #Clinical psychology #Developmental psychology #Early Childhood Education and Development #Educational and Psychological Assessments #Medicine #Nonsense #Psychiatry #Psychology
paper · doi:10.1080/17470215408416663
published in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 6(4), 181-185 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 1954/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
“High-anxiety” and “low-anxiety” subjects, selected for extreme scores on the Taylor Anxiety Scale, learned a list of paired-associate nonsense syllables in the belief that they were undergoing an intelligence test. Both groups were then given a second list of paired associates to learn, the stimulus-items being the same as those of the first list but the responses being changed. Before the presentation of the second list, half the subjects in each group were given anxiety-increasing instructions and the remaining half were given reassuring instructions. The results verified two predictions made from Hull's behaviour theory, using the concept of fear or anxiety as a secondary drive:—“high anxiety” subjects took more trials to master the second learning task than “low-anxiety” subjects; and there was a significant interaction between initial anxiety-level and type of instructions, such that “high-anxiety” subjects who received drive-increasing instructions had a worse performance in the second part than all other sub-groups. There was no indication that “low-anxiety” subjects were significantly affected by the type of instructions received. The “high-anxiety” group had greater difficulty than the “low-anxiety” group in learning the first list, but the difference was non-significant.