Physiological Response to Stress During Testing

Abstract

A student’s academic career and future profession can be determined by a number of crucial exams, which can evoke test anxiety. This study was performed to see the effect of test anxiety on the physiological measures of heart rate (HR), respiration rate (RR) and brain activity, and the respective student performance. Participants (n=50) were randomly selected to complete a 49 piece puzzle in either a non-stressed (n=25) or a stressed environment (n=25). It was hypothesized that all tested physiological measures would have significant changes between the non-stressed and stressed environments, which would then show a significant difference in time to completion of the puzzle. The results showed that HR had a significant difference when comparing the non-stressed and stressed environments using the percent change between the before baseline HR measure to the maximum HR during the puzzle (p = 0.00021) and the maximum HR during the puzzle to the after baseline HR measure (p = 0.0041). RR had a significant difference when comparing the environments using the percent change of the RR during the puzzle to the RR after (p=0.024) as did brain activity when comparing percent change from before the puzzle to during (p=0.035). These significant changes of physiological measures did not elicit a decrease in student performance in the stressed environment (p= 0.64) and suggests that physiological impacts were not enough to create a change of time to completion.