action between the person and the task environment. One key issue is how the
task environment, in conjunction with personality factors, influences the
adaptive significance of task performance. The person performing an intel-
lectual task must, in effect, decide whether it is worthwhile to commit effort,
whether the task is beyond their capabilities, and whether there is a need for
personal reflection. These issues have been explored, in part, in the test anxi-
ety literature, but this research has tended to focus on distress and worry, ne-
glecting the role of task engagement. The second key issue is how the state
changes driven by self-regulation may feed back into objective performance.
While the effects of state factors on intellectual performance are often mod-
est, task and contextual factors appear to moderate correlations between
states and performance. Some effects of states on information processing
seem to generalize across contexts, but are moderated by task demands.
These include the detrimental effect of cognitive interference, whose effects
on performance depend on the processing demands of the task. It appears
that tasks that require elaborated encoding, that require extensive use of
working memory, and that require retrieval of relatively inaccessible memo-
ries are maximally sensitive to worry, anxiety, or both (Zeidner, 1998). Like-
wise, intellectual tasks that require sustaining attention under high workload
conditions may be most sensitive to the variations in resource availability as-
sociated with task engagement. Other effects of state, that are mediated by
changes in coping, depend more on personal and contextual factors. For ex-
ample, the influence of task focus on performance is likely to depend on the
person’s ability to formulate and implement a workable strategy for perform-
ance enhancement: task-focused coping does not automatically confer im-
proved intellectual functioning (Zeidner, 1998). Furthermore, task strategy
varies qualitatively with adaptive goals congruent with state. For example, in
fatigued, disengaged states, people prefer to use decision-making strategies
that minimize effort, and are reactive rather than proactive (Matthews, Davies,
et al., 2000). Thus, it is not very informative to pose traditional questions, such
as “what is the magnitude of the relationship between intelligence and anxi-
ety?” Instead, research should emphasize how states facilitate or impair the
ability to perform at the person’s level of competence within specific social con-
texts, on tasks making specified demands on processing. That is, states may
signal the extent to which typical performance within a given context ap-
proaches maximal performance (see Ackerman & Kanfer, chap. 5).
CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, we have approached intellectual functioning, in the sense of
reasoning and problem-solving, as one of several, interrelated classes of proc-
ess that support adaptation. Coping and appraisal may be seen as intellectual
- TRAITS, STATES AND INTELLECTUAL FUNCTIONING 169