ety may have the same factor structure as test anxiety (cf. Sarason & Sarason,
1990), being comprised of the following facets: worry, task irrelevant
thinking, somatic arousal, and tension. Driving anxiety is a less well-known
construct, but also seems to comprise both negative affect and cognitive com-
ponents, such as disturbing thoughts about driving (Matthews, 2002). As
with neuroticism, it is likely that the various expressions of the anxiety traits
reflect multiple levels of abstraction. Social anxiety relates both to sympa-
thetic arousal in social settings (Beck, 1989), and to high level self-regulative
cognitions that generate pessimistic outcome expectancies in social situations
(Carver & Scheier, 1988).
All three types of anxiety are known to have detrimental effects on cogni-
tive skills. The adverse impact of test anxiety on intellectual functioning and
examination performance is well-known, although the effect is fairly modest.
Meta-analyses suggest a correlation of about –.2 between test anxiety and in-
dices of academic performance such as grade point average (Zeidner, 1998).
Several studies suggest that social anxiety is related to deficits in social skills,
such as lack of fluency in conversational speech and delivering and decoding
nonverbal signals (Bruch, 2001). Studies of driving anxiety using a driving
simulator show that this trait relates to impairments in vehicle control and at-
tention to secondary task stimuli, especially when the driver is exposed to a
stressful experience of losing control of the vehicle (Matthews, 2002). There
may be various mechanisms that mediate the behavioral effects of the anxiety
traits, but there are at least two common features. First, detrimental effects
are most reliable in stressful settings; indeed, test anxiety may even be posi-
tively correlated with performance in reassuring situations (Zeidner, 1998).
Second, a major mediating mechanism in each case is cognitive interference;
worry-related thoughts divert attention from task-related processing and in-
terfere with execution of skills. For example, social situations (public speak-
ing, dating, meeting new persons, talking with a supervisor) provoke disrup-
tive thinking for many people (Sarason et al., 1995). Common themes in these
disruptive cognitions involve inadequacy in meeting demands of the situation
and expectations of others. Thus, many socially anxious persons worry, often
quite unrealistically, about what they see as unappealing features of their per-
sonality, social skills, behavior, or physical appearance, producing errors and
uncertainties in performance, discomfort in social situations, and degraded
interpersonal behavior.
There are also commonalities in the bases for the different types of anxiety
in self-knowledge. Both social and test anxiety can be couched within self-
regulative models, that attribute both types of anxiety to concerns about be-
ing negatively evaluated, socially or academically (Carver & Scheier, 1988;
Sarason et al., 1995). In both social and test situations, people periodically in-
terrupt their task efforts to assess the degree to which they are attaining their
desired goals, and, in the anxious person, these self-evaluations are typically
156 MATTHEWS AND ZEIDNER