Reappraising Arousal Improves GRE Performance - Mendes etal (2010)

Students can study for hours to boost their test performance. Is there low-hanging fruit that gives a significant increase for very little effort? This study says "yes".

Anxiety or Challenge Response

Before and during a "big test", we often feel anxious. Sometimes this anxiety even becomes debilitating -- we "blank out" or "have a mind cramp" severely hurting our test performance. Research by Mendes etal may hold clues about turning the tide on anxiety and improving our test performance.

Anxiety is one way a person can appraise physiological arousal. Physiological arousal is generally characterized by increased heart rate, perhaps sweaty palms, and so on. More technically, it is associated with increases in sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity. Anxiety decreases performance.

However, arousal can also be appraised as the body mobilizing resources to meet a challenge. Challenge motivational states have been linked in several studies to better cognitive performance in a variety of domains including pattern-detection, cooperative games, and decision-making tasks.

Research

Mendes etal researched the effects of reappraising pretest arousal as a challenge response rather than anxiety. They recruited 60 students 31 male, 29 female) planning to take the high-stakes Graduate Record Exam (GRE) within 3 months. Of these, 28 (57% male) actually took the GRE within the 3-month window and participated in a follow-up session.

Prior to taking a GRE practice test, participants were divided into a control group and a reappraisal group. The reappraisal group read instructions which included a paragraph suggesting to them that arousal, which they might feel as anxiety, can actually help them do well. The control group had the same instructions without the paragraph. Then both groups completed the GRE practice problems in a verbal and quantitative (math) section.

The reappraisal group scored 55 points better than the control group on the math section (mean score 739 vs 684). There was no significant difference on the verbal section.

Physiological testing indicated the reappraisal group had significantly increased SNS activity preceding testing, compared with the control group. Further, in the math but not verbal section, for the reappraisal but not control group, increased SNS was related to better test scores. This is consistent with the idea that math result challenge states have greater SNS activation than threat (anxiety) states, and greater SNS activation (ie, greater arousal) may mediate better math performance.

In the follow-up session for students who went on to take the actual GRE during the next 3 months, the reappraisal group scored 64 points better than the control group on the math section (mean score 770 vs 706). There was no significant difference on the verbal section.

Implications

The difference between math and verbal improvement may likely be due to math problems generally requiring test-takers to use greater executive resources, compared to verbal problems (eg, typically antonyms and analogies) that retrieve information from long-term storage with less processing requirements.

Further, the reappraisal group had significantly lower standard deviation than the control group on the math section: 39 points lower on practice, 29 points on the actual GRE). GEG note: In both exams, mean scores are near the top of the range suggesting that variance is due largely to those who "bomb"; there isn't much room to "excel". The implication might be that reappraisal helps prevent "bombing" the test due to anxiety-linked "blank-outs" or "brain cramps".

This math improvement, about 8% in mean scores, is an amazingly beneficial result for a simple intervention given more than a month before the actual GRE, and that required only moments of the test-taker's time! Mendes etal note similarly amazing efficacy in a 2006 study in which a simple writing intervention at the beginning of an academic term improved final grades by 40%.

GEG note: Speculatively this result is even more potent, if improvement in the mean score comes largely by preventing anxiety-related "blank-outs" as speculated above. Assuming for example the fraction of participants subject to such anxiety blank-outs may be 10~20%, and their improvement accounts for the entire effect, then the improvement in the scores of anxiety-vulnerable individuals would be phenomenal compared to if they had received no reappraisal intervention.

-g

Source technical article:

Jamieson, Jeremy P., Wendy Berry Mendes, Erin Blackstock, Toni Schmader. 2010. Turning the knots in your stomach into bows: Reappraising arousal improves performance on the GRE. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46(1): 208-212.

On-line article access as of July 2016.