Author(s): Katharine Tesar, Michael Banasky
Mentor(s): Josh Brown
Institution SUU
Micheal Eysenck, in his 1992 book Anxiety: The Cognitive Perspective, described anxiety as a “system [that’s] specially adapted for the purpose of threat detection.” As anxiety detects threats, however, other factors, such as a need for cognitive closure, can exacerbate these feelings (White, 2022). As such, we predict that need for cognitive closure will thus be positively associated with state anxiety such that those with higher levels of NFC report higher state anxiety. In this study, participants (N=166) were recruited from a large research institution in the Southwestern US. Final participants had a mean age of 19.46 (SD=3.12), identified majority as female (68.7%), and were majority White (59.6%) with some Hispanic/Latino (25.3%), Black (7.8%), Asian/Asian-American (6.6%), and other racial/ethnic identity (0.7%). As part of a larger study, participants completed a survey where they answered questions on the following measures: their need for cognitive closure (Roets, 2011) and their state anxiety (Marteau & Bekker, 1992). Linear regression modeling of this data revealed that there is no relationship between state anxiety and NFC. This did not support our hypothesis. To investigate this, we looked more closely at the state anxiety scale in relation to the NFC scale. Our findings suggest that state anxiety is not related to NFC. Implications of this data include levels of anxiety experienced by students having no clear relationship to their need for cognitive closure, indicating that there is a need for more research to be conducted on this topic.