Differentiating Preparation Anxiety from Performance Anxiety: Toward a New Construct

Psychological research on student anxiety has focused heavily on performance contexts: situations where students present a final product. These contexts share several features in common; they are high-stakes, brief, with clear expectations, and are often evaluated. In contrast, preparation contexts—which are longer, more ambiguous, and offer more behavioral leeway—are treated less consistently. The result is a fragmented literature: anxiety during the preparation phase is alternately modeled as anticipatory performance anxiety, undifferentiated state (or trait) anxiety, narrow and task-specific contextualized anxiety, or rational-actor calculations that omit emotion almost completely. In the present article, we argue for the development of a new construct—preparation anxiety—to bridge these disparate treatments and offer a common framework for future research. We define preparation anxiety as anxiety that occurs while preparing for an upcoming performance, proposing a framework that distinguishes preparation and performance anxiety along two dimensions: temporal duration and situation strength. Based on these, we develop hypotheses regarding the physiology, cognition, and behavior associated with performance anxiety and preparation anxiety: The two are proposed to differ in terms of the relative engagement of the sympatho–adrenal–medullary system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis; the relative ease of interpretation of somatic experience and behavioral expectations; the modification of behavior by personality and situation; and the consequences of anxiety for health and self-regulation. We close by considering how preparation anxiety might reframe current understandings of anticipatory anxiety and laziness, and by considering the use of situation-strengthening interventions to address the negative consequences of anxiety.