The Study of Performance of Visual and Auditory Memory in Anxiety Levels

 The purpose of the study was to investigate
the performance of the auditory and visual memory with different anxiety
levels. Seventy-eight undergraduate students in Shiraz University
participated in the study. The subjects first answered the Beck Anxiety
Questionnaire and, based on their anxiety scores, were categorized in four
groups; namely, non-anxiety, low anxiety, moderate anxiety, and high anxiety
students. All subjects were exposed to a self-threat program. Then they were
given two auditory and visual memory tasks. For data analysis, ANOVA was
applied. The results indicated that anxiety affected auditory memory only and
that the difference was observed between moderate and high anxiety groups. The
findings show that the negative effects of anxiety on the performance of tasks
with phonological processes involving working memory are more compared with
those in visual tasks. Since the moderate anxiety group had the best
performance on auditory tasks, it can be argued that an optimum level of
arousal could help with a better performance.