Group differences in metacomprehension accuracy after manipulating stress levels

AUTHORS: Irene Bauer, Hisham Salhi, and Samantha Higgins
FACULTY: Erin Madison
DEPARTMENT: Psychology

ABSTRACT

Students report feeling immense stress during college (American College Health Association, 2019), which likely worsened during the two-year global pandemic (White, 2022). Stress has been shown to affect many cognitive processes, so it may also influence metacognitive judgments, which may, in turn, impact academic performance. Some studies show test anxiety benefits metacognitive ability by decreasing overconfidence and increasing relative accuracy, or the ability to determine which information is best understood (Miesner & Maki, 2007; Stober & Esser, 2001). A conflicting study demonstrated higher stress reactivity leads to worse relative accuracy on a meta-perceptual task (Reyes et al., 2015). The current study aims to disambiguate the effect of stress on metacognition by explicitly manipulating stress. Student volunteers were randomly assigned to a stress or control condition. The stress condition, following the protocol of the Trier Social Stress Test, had participants prepare and deliver a 5-minute speech on why they qualified for their dream position, then completed a consecutive subtraction task. The control condition played a neutral game for the same amount of time. Participants completed the state and trait anxiety inventory before and after this manipulation, then read and made judgments on six different passages, and finally took a multiple-choice test. Surprisingly, the results showed no significant differences between groups for any variable (prediction magnitude, multiple choice accuracy, bias score, relative accuracy). Results trend toward the direction of better metacognition under stress, suggesting that they are less overconfident. This reduction in overconfidence correlates with effective study habits and therefore better academic performance. However, because we found stress does not impact predictions and test accuracy, we suggest students implement stress management strategies. In the future, we will analyze variables like perceived stress, as the stress manipulation might affect some students more than others.