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The Effect Of Anxiety On Direction Of Attention And Short-Term Memory, Charles B. Kreitzberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of anxiety on rehearsal in short-term memory. It was hypothesized that anxiety arousal would result in attentional alternation between task-relevant rehearsal and task-irrelevant personalized thinking. Because atten­tional focus becomes increasingly unitary at high levels of arousal, it was anticipated that the alternation resulting from anxiety would interfere with rehearsal of task-relevant information in short-term memory.

One hundred-fifty subjects were randomly assigned to a high-stress (testlike) or low-stress (neutral) condition. They were shown to-be- recalled strings consisting of seven consonants of low associability. Following a 1.5 second exposure to a given …