How does being nervous or anxious before and while taking an IQ test affect performance?

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We asked  our participants (n = 3688) about their anxiety/nervousness level, both before and during taking the tests. Specifically, before taking the tests, we asked them five questions about their current anxiety state (e.g. “I feel upset right now.”, “I feel nervous right now.”) and summed up their responses to obtain their pre-test anxiety score. After taking the tests, we asked them how nervous or anxious the cognitive/intelligence tasks we had them do in the study caused them to feel and they responded on a five-point scale from “not at all” to “very much.” Therefore, we had their levels of anxiety both before tests (pre-test anxiety) and during the tests (test anxiety).

The correlation between their pre-test anxiety and IQ was r = -0.13, while the correlation between their test-anxiety and IQ was r = -0.23. This means that participants who felt anxious or nervous both before and while solving tasks performed worse on the tasks. The causal direction here could go both ways: being nervous could cause people to underperform, but underperforming on tasks could make people feel nervous or anxious too. Here are the two scatterplot showing these correlations.

What do the other studies say?

Meta analyses also found that, in general, there is a negative relationship between state anxiety while taking tests and score on that test, including IQ tests (e.g. Seipp, 1991; von der Embse et al., 2018).

Takeaways

• Participants who were feeling nervous or anxious both before and while taking IQ tests performed worse on those tests

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