Moreover, according to cognitive-interference approach, anxiety has a direct negative impact on performance in examination. Highly anxious individuals divide their attention between examination-irrelevant thoughts, such as self-evaluation and worry, and examination-relevant thoughts such as problem-solving. They tend to turn their attention to inappropriate cues and they cannot limit range of cues that hinders their performance. For that reason, anxiety is a portion of the processing capacity that is needed for task performance (Macher, et al., 2013).
