Test anxiety (TA) is an internalizing behavior among students and a major emotional problem that has a negative effect on learning. It is a reaction of an emotional negative character generated before the expectative created by the imminence or presence of a test and that many students perceive it as a threat to the person (Álvarez et al., 2008). According the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), different categories have been established to determine the symptoms of TA: physical (headache, nausea, diarrhea, excessive sweating, shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, light-headedness and feeling faint can all occur), emotional (feelings of anger, fear, helplessness, and disappointment) and behavioral/cognitive (difficulty concentrating, thinking negatively and comparing yourself to others).

Test anxiety can be understood from multiple theoretical perspectives. First of all, it should be considered if TA has been assessed as a one-dimensional, two-dimensional or multidimensional construct. Early conceptions conceived TA as a one-dimensional construct. However, research revealed its multidimensional nature (Stöber, 2004; Piemontesi et al., 2012). Liebert and Morris (1967) differentiated two principal components of TA: worry (cognitive component) and emotionality (affective component). Later, multidimensional conceptualizations of TA were of increasing importance. So, Hodapp (1995) differenced various dimensions of TA: worry, emotionality, interference, and lack of confidence.

Secondly, according to Wine (1971), a highly test-anxious person distributes his attention between self-relevant and task-relevant variables during task execution. But a low-test-anxious person focuses his attention entirely on the task. Likewise, the attentional control theory postulates that anxiety impairs the efficiency of two types of attentional control (Derakshan and Eysenck, 2009). On one side, anxiety impairs negative attentional control which involved in inhibiting attention to task-irrelevant stimuli. On the other side, anxiety impairs positive attentional control which involved in flexibly switching attention between and within tasks to maximize performance. So, according with Eysenck et al. (2007), efficient functioning of the goal-directed attentional system is affected by anxiety. Also, processing is affected by the stimulus-driven attentional system. Besides, anxiety increases attention to threat-related stimuli to decreasing attentional control.

Finally, Processing Efficiency Theory is one of most remarkable theoretical models to explain the effects of TA on performance (Eysenck and Calvo, 1992; Calvo, 1996; Calvo and García, 1999). Thoughts of worry generated by anxious subjects have two main effects: they interfere with memory processing and they enhance the use of complementary resources. Therefore, if the student has these additional resources, such as: adaptive coping styles with academic stress (task-orientation and preparation, seeking social support, and avoidance), he/she can reduce anxiety and improve the individual performance (Piemontesi et al., 2012).

In a school environment, TA causes poor cognitive performance, psychological distress and ill health, as well as TA is associated with lower academic performance (Zeidner, 1998). There is a widespread agreement about the relationship between scholastic underachievement and TA, and about the negative impact the feeling of anxious when taking a test has on students’ life. Chapell et al. (2005) investigated this relationship, finding that a significant inverse relationship exists between TA and grade point average (GPA). Hembree (1988) examined the relationship between TA and others variables. Students’ self-esteem is affected by TA, finding an inverse relationship between both variables. Also fear of negative evaluation, defensive attitude, and other forms of anxiety relates directly to TA. The test-anxious students got a poor performance and were less motivated when they were exposed to highly evaluative classrooms (Hancock, 2001).

Because of the serious consequences of TA on learning and its increased prevalence during adolescence (Ahmadpanah et al., 2016), it is crucial to identify whether individual characteristics may contribute to this incremental form of anxiety. In this sense, attention to feelings represents an important personal resource associated with multiple indicators of non-adaptive functioning. People who pay attention to emotions tend to observe and think about their feelings and moods. It is well established that when the process of paying attention to moods becomes excessive, people obtain higher scores on depression and anxiety symptoms and this might increase ruminations or intrusive thoughts (Goldman et al., 1996; Salovey et al., 2000; Fernández-Berrocal et al., 2004). Also, the findings support the consideration of emotional attention as a theoretically relevant construct and predictive empirically individual differences in accounted for depression and burnout (Extremera et al., 2006; Pena and Extremera, 2012; Pena et al., 2012).

Recent research has shown increasing interest in emotional self-conscious and their implications for well-being, health and better emotional adjustment (Bastian et al., 2005; Schutte et al., 2007). Emotional attention was negatively associated with lower social functioning in women (Extremera and Fernández-Berrocal, 2002). In the same way, attention to feelings was positively associated with negative affect (e.g., distressed, irritable, guilty, fearful, and nervous) as measured through the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), and negatively associated with life satisfaction (Sánchez-Álvarez et al., 2015). Salovey et al. (2002) found that attention to moods was correlated with lowered cortisol and blood pressure responses to laboratory challenges and psychophysiological measures of adaptive coping. On the other hand, Moriarty et al. (2001) found a relationship between attention to feelings and sexual delinquency. The scores of the adolescent sex offenders’ partners were higher on attention to feelings than non-sex offenders partners. Besides, a growing body of research has pointed out that the own experience of affect has broadly been linked to mental disorders (Boden et al., 2013). Affective instability was positively correlated with attention to emotion (Gohm and Clore, 2002; Thompson et al., 2009), and lower levels of attention to emotion were better predictors of recovery from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) than severity of MDD, Negative Affect, or Positive Affect (Thompson et al., 2013).

Some researchers have suggested that individuals with higher scores for trait emotional intelligence had lower TA scores (Ahmadpanah et al., 2016). However, up to date, no studies have been reported about the effect of emotional attention on TA. Therefore it is necessary to provide empirical evidence on this issue.

Table 1 shows the means, standard deviations and internal consistency reliabilities (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients) for all measured variables.

In the present work, we analyzed the effects of the Self-Rumination and Self-Reflection in mediating the association of Emotional attention and TA.

Overall, our results suggest that Emotional Attention in adolescents is an important factor for processing emotional information during a TA experience. Mor and Winquist (2002) have examined the hypothesis that self-focused attention influences negative affect (i.e., depression and anxiety). However, researchers don’t know why people with high emotional attention report higher (o more) intense TA than others. In order to extend previous work, we have conducted a study specifically focusing on the mediating role of Self-Rumination and Self-Reflection in the association between Emotional Attention and TA, after controlling gender and depression.

Our results indicate that people with greater Self-Rumination report higher levels of TA. These findings are consistent with previous works that identified associations between high levels of Self-Rumination and higher emotional disorder (Elliott and Coker, 2008); replicating previous findings that have also shown that ruminative self-focus is a negative predictor for psychological well-being (Harrington and Loffredo, 2010) and is maladaptive (Teasdale and Green, 2004). Further analyses suggested that the cognitive components of worry and self-preoccupation, which are presents in Self-Rumination, play an important role in TA (Minor and Gold, 1985; Sarason, 1988). Worried adolescents’ student become more anxious under testing conditions because they maintain a style of recurrent negative thinking (rumination); that is, the causes, consequences, and implications of negative events and feelings are repetitively analyzed (Baer, 2007). So, they are not able to face the test situation keeping calm and trusting their knowledge and personal resources.

In addition, our findings agree with those obtained in other studies (Salovey et al., 2000; Jiménez and López-Zafra, 2008), showing that people who have a greater emotional attention manage less effectively the negative emotions in stressful situations. The results of the present study confirm that self-rumination mediates the influence of emotional attention on TA perception. These results also are consistent with the idea that people with high emotional attention tend to perceive higher TA than those who have lower emotional attention. In fact, they generate high levels of self-rumination during the exam (Mor and Winquist, 2002). In this way, mediation analysis results are consistent with a model in which negative affect mediates the relationship between emotional attention and TA perception. Consequently, self-rumination fully mediated the link between emotional attention and TA: emotional attention was associated with high scores in self-rumination; and these high self-rumination scores in turn increased reliance upon TA.

We will briefly outline some of the limitations of this study. The results should be interpreted in light of these limitations. Firstly, our study design was cross-sectional one, which prevented us from establishing causal relationships between Emotional Attention, Self-Rumination and TA. Causal relationships can be established by using a randomized controlled trial design with intervention and controlled condition would be highly recommended. Likewise, it should take longitudinal approaches in order to examine the casual effects of emotional deficits on adolescent’s well-being with better accuracy. Secondly, despite of the sample is representative of the population, the use of a convenience rather than a random sample reduced generalizability of results. Finally, for future researchers, it would be necessary to examine whether the grade level would have some influence on TA. This would provide better understanding of the differentiating role that Emotional Attention plays in scholars from different educational levels. Finally, as Palmieri et al. (2009) have pointed out there is an important aspect of emotional awareness that is not captured by TMMS which is the ability to understand the source of one’s own emotions.

It would also be interesting for future research to explore why people are feeling what they are feeling, to examine whether personal resources and strategies that people use to mitigate their TA may be associated with their emotional intelligence.

Despite these limitations, our findings provided an opportunity for critical discussion and reflection. Theoretically, our findings make an important contribution to an expanding literature on attention to emotion. The present study provides insight into how emotional attention influences self-rumination and the TA. Regarding practice, our research might exert a positive effect on quality of adolescents’ life by reducing the deleterious effects of negative emotions provoked by TA or lower education achievements. In this way, it may help to design pedagogical interventions aimed at improving this emotional ability in people with TA problems. It should be emphasized the importance of training the emotional attention as an essential part of emotional intelligence programs, as a tool for enhancing reflective thinking, where students feel fascinated, not anxious or worried, to discover new things about themselves. Teaching individuals with TA problems through emotional intelligence programs may therefore be a useful way to approach this issue in schools. On the other hand, teachers may play an important role in developing an awareness of the adaptive coping styles with academic stress; rather than adolescent scholars focus only on their negative emotions and thoughts. Hence, teachers can assist scholars by teaching them to identify and cope with the emotions produced by stressful scholar task, before and during the examination, and increasing the perceived belief that they can change themselves. Finally, adaptive emotional regulation strategies should be promoted, and maladjustment behaviors associated with TA and rumination should be prevented or challenged over the scholar period.

Each author has made substantial contributions to the work. Conception or design of the work: MP and LL. Data collection: MP. Data analysis and interpretation: MP and LL. Drafting the article: MP and LL. Critical revision of the article: MP and LL. Final approval of the version to be published: MP and LL.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.