Laboratory Experiments On Anxiety And Procrastination

Researches on procrastination have become prosperous in recent30years. However there are two pitfalls in this literature. One is that there were few laboratory experimental studies on procrastination. The second is that the power of emotion on procrastination has been underestimated. The object of current research is to address the impact of anxiety on procrastination by conducting carefully controlled experiments.Previous researches on anxiety and procrastination mostly used questionnaires to measure both anxious trait and procrastination traits and then made statistic correlation on these two scores. Most of these researches found there was positive correlation on the two factors. On contrary to this, the hypothesis of this study was:anxious state will induce individuals to reduce dilatory behavior.In order to testify this hypothesis, this research conducted3experiments. In experiment1,29participants were induced into high-anxious or low-anxious state. In the follow-up experimental setting, the participants in the high-anxious state spent more time in practicing for the coming up test and less time in entertaining than participants in the low-anxious state. The former also began practicing earlier than the latter. Experiment2has made some revise in the design to eliminate possible confounded factors that might influence the result. The experiment2has obtained the same conclusion as experiment1. Both the design and conducting of experiment3were identical with experiment2except the participants in experiment3were all male. Experiment3found no inhibiting effect of anxious on procrastination as experiment1&2did. And successive combined analysis of experiment2and3revealed that there was significant gender difference in the practicing time at high-anxious level.These experiments have evidenced that the state of anxiety might prompted female individual to take proactive actions for the most important task and thus reduce procrastination. But this proactive effect was limited to female in present research.