Programming is a complex learning activity that involves coordination of cognitive processes and affective states. These aspects are often considered individually in computing education research, demonstrating limited understanding of how and when students learn best. This issue confines researchers to contextualize evidence-driven outcomes when…

R. Martens' hypothesis that an audience acts as a stimulus to elicit arousal or drive in the performance of an individual, which in turn enhances the emission of the dominant habit, is reexamined. Where incorrect responses are dominant, learning of a novel task will be inhibited, or at least improvement will not be as rapid as for individuals…

While self-efficacy has been described as a basic mechanism underlying arousal and performance, the hypothesis that belief of higher self-efficacy should produce lower anticipatory arousal and distress has not been proven. This study assessed perceived self-efficacy, self-report measures of fear and arousal, performance across sex, and a…

A model is proposed that relates the personality dimensions of introversion-extraversion, achievement motivation, and anxiety to efficient cognitive performance. This general information-processing model also accounts for the systematic effects of motivational states on sustained information transfer and some aspects of short-term memory.…

This study examined whether particular strategies would enhance affective arousal and if these techniques would affect warm-up decrement during performance of a sport skill. One strategy eliminated warm-up decrement and two had no effect. Positive and negative arousal and the correlation of arousal level to warm-up decrement are explored.…

Measured arousal and motor responses as a function of conflict type and field structure. Using paper-and-pencil fields, subjects performed under four conflict conditions and a control condition. Arousal increased significantly with increasing conflict complexity and was habitual over repeated trials, though arousal did not differentiate field…

Article is concerned principally with the early acquisition of skills relating to the manipulation of things, though perforce the role of certain social skills is treated in the interest of explicating that topic. (Author/CB)