Anxiety and Performance in High-Achieving Adolescents: Associations Among 8 General and Specific Anxiety Measures and 13 School Grades

Maxim LIKHANOV, Evgenia ALENINA, Tomasz BLONIEWSKI, Xinlin ZHOU, Yulia KOVAS

ABSTRACT

Despite years of research, the links between domain-general and domain-specific anxieties (e.g., social), as well as their links with academic performance in different domains remain poorly understood. The current study explores anxiety-academic performance associations across eight domain-general and domain-specific anxiety measures (tapping into trait, state, maths, spatial, and social anxiety, worry, and anxiety sensitivity, as well as symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, GAD) and 13 school subjects in a large (N = ~800) sample of schoolchildren (Mage = 15.26), selected for high achievement in STEM, Arts, Sports, and Literature. Our data showed that all anxiety measures load onto single general anxiety factor, explaining 51% of variance; and suggesting substantive amount of unique variance in each measure. Regression analysis showed that domain-general anxiety (e.g., trait anxiety and GAD symptoms) did not explain much variance in academic outcomes, while domain-specific anxiety explained variance in respective domains. For example, maths anxiety was linked with Algebra and Geometry performance. The results demonstrated that the negative link between anxiety and performance is present even in adolescents with high academic achievement (i.e., adolescents with high achievement in STEM) and this link is of small-to-medium effect size. Interestingly, worry scale correlated positively with performance after controlling for other anxiety measures, probably reflecting this measure tapping into some motivational and/or arousal aspects of anxiety. The study provides new insights into anxiety-performance links that can be used for further development of measures and educational interventions.

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