Anxiety and Skill Acquisition

A person's cognitive processes can be influenced by their mood state and emotions. This can have implications for an individual's performance in a number of situations such as in the workplace, sporting arena and educational settings. People who experience high levels of anxiety have a tendency to engage in worry, or interfering thoughts, that can impact on working memory functioning. Because working memory plays an important role in attentional processes particularly during the initial stages of task learning, this book investigates the association between anxiety and cognitive skill acquisition and transfer. The association between state and trait anxiety, the intrusiveness of off task thoughts and working memory capacity are explored in the context of skill acquisition and transfer models.