Complex learning and conditioning as a function of anxiety.

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Abstract
The present study was concerned with the performance of anxious and non-anxious subjects on a stylus maze. It was predicted that the total performance of the non-anxious group would be superior to that of that of the anxious group in this relatively complex task, with the extent of their superiority at each choice point being a positive function of its difficulty. In addition, a comparison was made of the scores of a number of these same anxious and non-anxious subjects in eyelid conditioning, a task in which the anxious group was expected to show superior performance. Two groups of 40 subjects each, whose scores were,respectively, within the upper and lower 20% of scores on the Taylor A-scale learned the maze. Later, 26 subjects from each group served in the conditioning experiment. The maze performance of the anxious subjects was significantly poorer than that of the non-anxious subjects with the more difficult points of choice providing the greatest difference between the two groups. In conditioning, however, the anxious subjects were superior to the non-anxious. On the basis of these results it was concluded that the anxious and non-anxious groups in this study differed with respect to drive level (D) rather than general learning ability, and that the effect of variations in drive level upon performance is a function of specific characteristics of the given task.

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