0.1 Cognitive performance  (Page 7/7)

It makes sense that anxiety decreases mental functioning and performance. There is also probably going to be automatic amounts of worry and changing levels of motivation. The motivation shows an effort by the person to automatically try to decrease the anxiety or worry, which are more unconscious processes (because it is hard to control your anxiety or worry). Worry, motivation, and anxiety are going to take up resources and impact working memory (cognitive performance).

Eysenck and colleagues Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., + Calvo, M.G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7 (2), 336-353. recently extended the Processing Efficiency Theory to the more specific Attentional Control Theory. The Attentional Control Theory posits that anxiety, defined as a negative emotional and motivational state under threatening situations, affects cognitive performance by affecting two components of attentional control: top-down and stimulus-driven processes. Posner and Peterson Posner, M. I., + Peterson, S. E. (1990). The attention system brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13, 25-42. described the top-down or goal-directed attentional system as the involvement of expectation and knowledge of current goals, while the stimulus-driven process involves detecting and responding to sensory events that are clear and obvious. The Attentional Control Theory states that anxiety disrupts the balance of goal-directed stimulus-driven processes by decreasing top-down processing and increasing stimulus-driven processing (Eysenck). Assimilating this information with Wegner's two-process theory, anxiety would decrease the operating process, which is conscious and goal oriented, and increase the monitoring process, which is automatic and stimulus driven. Anxiety reduces stimulus-driven processing by affecting the automatic processing of threat-related stimuli, but may also affect performance in any ongoing task. The rationale for this is that it would be harmful to the individual to focus on only threatening material; the best strategy would be for anxiety to affect attentional resources globally, not just towards threatening material. The idea is that anxiety may be affected by external and internal cues, with worry being an internal cue. Because anxiety involves emotion and arousal, it is important to understand how emotion and arousal, in general, affect cognitive control.

In my view, the theory is that anxiety decreases conscious thinking (such as goal-oriented thinking) and it increases sensory response (such as things you feel or just response to sensory stimulation). This makes sense to me, anxiety is going to make someone less conscious because it is an unconscious process itself. When you aren't thinking, you are going to be responding to the world more physically. Anxiety would thus actually increase your sensory response. For instance you might be faster physically - more aware of your body and your own condition. Anxiety is going to decrease your worrying or whatever it is you are thinking about because you have to deal with being anxious. At the same time, you are going to be at a higher state of alert, so you would respond faster to physical, sensory stimulation.

So anxiety can impact your attention, and your ability to shift your attention. It could also impact the thoughts you have and the emotions you are experiencing. Anxiety could cause your attention to shift to more sensory things, and make you less conscious about your thoughts or non-sensory things that you are thinking. People pay attention in different ways, and have different cognitive processes. There are conscious processes and unconscious ones. Unconscious ones can monitor for other thoughts and other emotional states, and the conscious processes are going to be the things you do that are more or less under your control. But the conscious is just a small part of mental functioning. People couldn't do everything and have it be completely conscious - that is why there is a monitoring or unconscious process that keeps track of the other options - the other thoughts and emotions you might experience. Anxiety, attention, emotion, thought, consciousness - all of these things are key factors in mental functioning.