Locus of Control, Anxiety, and Cognitive Functioning

This study attempted to see if relationships between locus of control and information-processing ability could be explained by overlapping variance with trait anxiety. Stress conditions were varied in order to see if internal subjects' superiority in proofreading and incidental learning occurred only under conditions in which anxiety was negatively related to those criteria. Results from a study with 60 graduate students showed that neither external locus of control nor anxiety correlated significantly with information-processing measures in a non-stressful condition, while both personality variables correlated significantly and negatively with criteria in a stressful condition of arousal; and only anxiety reliably predicted performance criteria in an ambiguously stressful condition with 50 undergraduates.

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