How Does Anxiety Interfere with Learning, and What Should We Do About It?

Anxiety has long been thought to interfere with learning. Dutch investigators examined the neurobiology and implications of this phenomenon in a laboratory study of 44 healthy female students with either high or low social anxiety. High levels overlap with depressive disorders.

Participants were exposed to sets of repeated images of happy or angry faces that predicted reward (receiving money) or punishment (losing money); to receive the reward, participants pressed a button. The association between face and punishment in the various sets later varied randomly, thus surprising the subjects. The researchers measured the speed with which subjects adjusted their prediction of whether a particular stimulus would be rewarding.

Participants with hig…