Identification of item factor patterns within the Manifest Anxiety scale

Emotionality and performance on competitional and noncompetitional paired-associates

18 male college Ss scoring in the extreme quintiles on a unidimensional “emotionality” scale (Em) were tested on competitive and noncompetitive paired-associates. Results demonstrated that the low Em Ss made significantly fewer errors on both competitive and noncompetitive associates and required significantly fewer trials to reach criterion on the noncompetitive associates than did the high Em Ss. The results were compared to those of Spence, et al. (1963) for high- and low-“anxious” Ss on these same word pairs. Discrepant findings were interpreted as reflecting different operational measures of “anxiety” employed in the two studies.