We have all experienced some level of anxiety at one point or another during our lives. Whether we’re talking about exams, family issues or even work related problems, we can all relate to some level.
The Study
A new study that was published by a team of researchers in the Journal Brain Sciences claims that a moderate level of anxiety helps people in recounting details of different events for a longer period of time. In contrast, when people were experiencing very high levels of anxiety they to recount otherwise banal and normal details of events as negative factors.
Myra Fernandes, who is teaching students at the University of Waterloo as a Professor, wanted to comment that people that experience high levels of anxiety should be very careful. A high degree of anxiety can lead certain people to an unbearable point where their performance and their memories start to be affected.
Who participated in this study?
The team of researchers brought together for their experiment 80 undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo. Out of all these participants, 64 were female students. They were divided in half. One half was part of a deep encoding group while the other was part of a very shallow encoding group.
What researchers found out was that individuals with very high anxiety levels were very sensitive to the events that happened in the group. Things that may have seemed trivial were changed by the perception of these people. One of the researchers, Cristopher Lee, went on to say that such a behavior is to be expected because people who think about neutral events as being negative experience a tendency to start having a negative mindset. This would hinder their ability to be a normal member of society, able to calmly undertake the tasks ahead of him or her.
