Different Attentional Functioning and Vigilance Under Trait Anxiety: An Experimental Study

Abstract

During recent years, the interest in measuring vigilance has increased. Furthermore, trait anxiety differently impacted different systems of attention, but the impact of trait anxiety was not previously measured with vigilance. That's why the current study was designed to measure the impact of trait anxiety on attentional systems and vigilance (executive and arousal). This is an experimental
study with 56 on-campus psychology students (males=12, and females=44) aged 19-28 years. The participants’ selection criteria were their scores on the state-trait anxiety scale by Spielberger (1983). Participants who scored 20-37 on STAI-T participated in a low-trait anxiety group and the participants who scored 45-80 participated in a high-trait anxiety group. Both groups performed ANTI-Vea tasks to measure attention and vigilance. After task completion, participants again filled out STAI-T to ensure they were assigned to the relevant group. Three repeated measure ANOVA was used for analysis. The results revealed that as compared to the anxiety group of high traits, alerting and orienting networks of the low trait group were less effective. There exist no significant difference in accuracy and reaction time in both group. No evidence of executive and arousal vigilance decrement was documented. In conclusion, it is evident from the findings that using 4 blocks in the ANTI-Vea task is not so efficient for showing vigilance decrement. Future studies
could use all 6 blocks of the task to exhibit vigilance decrement.