England – Researchers at the Council of Economic and Social Research (ESRC) have evaluated the effects of stress on the ability to solve simple problems. If the result is the same regardless of the degree of stress, the most anxious people will provide more efforts to arrive at the result.

Several experiments were conducted to measure the effects of anxiety: while playing computer games, reading a story or solving simple math problems, a person is seen more anxious, the more it takes to achieve the expected result.

In the first experiment, participants were to read a story book while being distracted. The more anxious they were, took more time to read the story because they were distracted by the words launched by researchers. They tend to look for the relevance of these words in the activity they are doing. For multiplications and divisions, the most stressed have more time to get the right answers, especially when the two arithmetic tasks were alternated.

Stress prompts to mobilize more resources to accomplish a task without preventing to achieve the desired result. Professor Eysenck of the ESRC said: “The negative effects of anxiety seem to come from the difficulties of attention it generates. Training techniques that provide control of attention could help students reach their academic potential. This shows that teachers should not only focus on the academic performance of students but also on how they manage to get their results. “