Does overloading cognitive resources mimic the impact of anxiety on temporal cognition?

Personality, intelligence, and academic achievement: Charting their developmental interplay

OBJECTIVE

Although intelligence and personality traits have long been recognized as key predictors of students' academic achievement, little is known about their longitudinal and reciprocal associations. Here, we charted the developmental interplay of intelligence, personality (Big Five) and academic achievement in 3880 German secondary school students, who were assessed four times between the ages 11 and 14 years (i.e., in grades 5, 6, 7, and 8).

METHOD

We fitted random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPs) to investigate reciprocal within-person associations between (a) academic achievement and intelligence, (b) academic achievement and personality, as well as (c) intelligence and personality.

RESULTS

The results revealed negative within-person associations between Conscientiousness and Extraversion assessed at the first wave of measurement and intelligence assessed at the second wave. None of the reciprocal personality-achievement associations attained statistical significance. Academic achievement and intelligence showed reciprocal within-person relations, with the strongest coefficients found for achievement longitudinally predicting intelligence.

CONCLUSIONS

Our work contributes to developmental theorizing on interrelations between personality, intelligence, and academic achievement, as well as to within-person conceptualizations in personality research.

Loss-related mental states impair executive functions in a context of sadness

Stress and anxiety have been shown to temporally impair executive functions, but the role of other emotions, such as sadness, has been inconclusive. Moreover, the role of affect regulation in this relationship has not been extensively studied. The present research investigated whether certain types of mental states (mental output resulting from the use of affect regulation within a specific context or with respect to a specific material or theme) relative to the context of loss would predict impairment of executive functions. Participants were randomly assigned to read either a loss-related newspaper article inducing sadness or a neutral newspaper article. Results showed that low mental states relative to loss (maladaptive affect regulation) predicted impairment of executive functions following an induction of sadness, but not following the neutral induction. Conversely, high mental states (adaptive affect regulation) were not predictive of impairment of executive functions in both the sadness and neutral condition. These findings have implications for the boundaries within which emotion can disrupt high-order cognitive processes.

Trait anxiety does not correlate with metacognitive confidence or reminder usage in a delayed intentions task

Setting external reminders provides a convenient way to reduce cognitive demand and ensure accurate retrieval of information for prospective tasks. Recent experimental evidence has demonstrated that the decision to offload cognitive information to external resources is guided by metacognitive belief, that is, individuals’ confidence in their unaided ability. Other work has also suggested a relationship between metacognitive belief and trait anxiety. In the present study (N = 300), we bridged these two areas by investigating whether trait anxiety correlated with metacognitive belief and—consequently—propensity to offload information in a delayed intentions paradigm. Participants received a financial reward based on their ability to remember targets. However, participants could take a reduced reward per target if they decided to use reminders. We replicated previous findings that participants were biased to use more reminders than would be optimal, and this bias was correlated with metacognitive judgements. However, we show no evidence that trait anxiety held a relationship with metacognitive belief or reminder usage. Indeed, Bayesian analyses strongly favoured the null. Therefore, variation in self-reported trait anxiety does not necessarily influence confidence and strategy when participants remember delayed intentions.