Differential effects of stress-inducing instructions on anxiety, learning and performance

Marton, F. I., Fransson, A., Jonsson, B., Klenell, A.-Ch. & Roos, B. Differential effects of stress-inducing instructions on anxiety, learning and performance. Scand. J. Psychol., 1973, 14, 213–219.-In an attempt to investigate the effects of induced stress on anxiety, learning and performance, the separate effects on the learning and performance phases were obtained by varying the timing of the introduction and the removal of stressinducing instructions. Stess-inducing instructions had a positive effect on learning but were not significantly related to the level of anxiety in the learning phase. In the performance phase the results were reversed, i.e. the stress-inducing instructions had a significantly positive effect on the level of anxiety but none on performance. The apparent paradox stemming from the significant negative relationship between anxiety and achievement within conditions could be resolved by considering the common confusion concerning statistical vs. causal relationship.     

The impact of verbal instructions on goal-directed behaviour

It is common to use verbal instructions when performing complex tasks. To evaluate how such instructions contribute to cognitive control, mixing costs (as a measure of sustained concentration on task) were evaluated in two task-switching experiments combining the list and alternating runs paradigms. Participants responded to bivalent stimuli according to a characteristic explicitly defined by a visually presented instructional cue. The processing of the cue was conducted under four conditions across the two experiments: Silent Reading, Reading Aloud, Articulatory Suppression, and dual mode (visual and audio) presentation. The type of cue processing produced a substantial impact on the mixing costs, where its magnitude was greatest with articulatory suppression and minimal with reading aloud and dual mode presentations. Interestingly, silently reading the cue only provided medium levels of mixing cost. The experiments demonstrate that relevant verbal instructions boost sustained concentration on task goals when maintaining multiple tasks.