Predictive capacity of attributional style in language on the manifestation of high levels of school anxiety responses

Abstract

School anxiety consists of a set of cognitive, behavioral, and psychophysiological responses that students emit when they perceive situations in the school setting as a threat. Although students may be more likely to manifest school anxiety responses according to their attributional style in the area of language, the existing scientific literature on the relationship between both constructs in adolescence is limited. The present study aimed to examine the predictive capacity of causal attributions in language on the three school anxiety responses: cognitive anxiety, behavioral anxiety and psychophysiological anxiety. The School Anxiety Inventory (SAI) and the Sydney Attribution Scale (SAS) were administered to 586 students between 12 and 18 years old (M = 14.82; SD = 1.86). Logistic regression models revealed odd ratio (OR) values higher than 1 for failure in language attributed to effort and ability in cognitive anxiety, behavioral anxiety and psychophysiological anxiety. The OR values for the rest of the causal attributions examined were less than 1 in the three school anxiety responses. Therefore, it is concluded that by increasing the scores in attributions of successes and failures in language to external causes, the probability of presenting high cognitive anxiety, high behavioral anxiety, and high psychophysiological anxiety decreases. However, as the scores in the variables of causal attributions of failures to internal causes increase, the probability of presenting high levels in the three anxiety responses increases. These findings will facilitate the design of interventions aimed at changing the attributional style of adolescents towards adaptive causal attributions.