Test anxiety and emotion regulation among undergraduate medical students in China: the mediating role of psychological resilience

Abstract

Background: Medical students experience a considerable amount of anxiety due to exams. Emotion regulation and psychological resilience are established protective factors of individual mental health, however, the investigations for the effects of anxiety were limited. The goal of the present study was to examine the relationship of psychological resilience and emotion regulation with test anxiety and the associated factors of them among medical students. Methods: In this cross-sectional survey, a simple random sampling methods was used to select the participants. Information from a sample of 1266 medical students was collected by self-reporting questionnaires. Logistic regression was applied to test the associations between test anxiety and emotion regulation, resilience. Bootstrap were conducted to explore the mediating role of resilience. Results: Our important results were that the prevalence of problematic test anxiety among medical students to be 71.4%, 33.7% was high test anxiety. Gender and academic performance correlated significantly with test anxiety, emotion regulation, and psychological resilience. There were correlations between test anxiety and various dimensions of emotion regulation and psychological resilience ( P<0.01 ). Emotion regulation and psychological resilience predicted emerging test anxiety. The mediating role of psychological resilience was identified for the effects of emotion regulation on test anxiety. Conclusions: Findings suggest that emotion regulation affected test anxiety through psychological resilience, which may provide insights for clinical psychologists, raise their awareness of the importance of cultivating and improving medical students' psychological resilience, and prompt them to offer psychological support to students with test anxiety as early as possible. The combination of curing and self-healing can solve the root cause of the problem and truly apply psychological research to improving the mental health of the general public. Keywords: Psychological resilience, Test anxiety, Emotion regulation, Medical student

Remote Online Exams Anxiety during the COVID-19 Crisis: A Cross-Sectional Study among Medical Students

“…Moreover, remote online exams were launched as an assessment approach to investigate students' academic performance during the current situation. Many studies have been done to determine the anxitey level of students, especially medical students, during exams up to now and most of these studies, from all over the world, indicated a high levels of this phenomenon in medical students (10). Some studies measured the test anxiety level too high, which performing serious interventions were considered necessary (10,11).…”

“…Many studies have been done to determine the anxitey level of students, especially medical students, during exams up to now and most of these studies, from all over the world, indicated a high levels of this phenomenon in medical students (10). Some studies measured the test anxiety level too high, which performing serious interventions were considered necessary (10,11). However, by the expansion of COVID-19, the learning and evaluation of the medical students shifted to be online more than before.…”

Test Anxiety and Psychological Resilience Among Moroccan Baccalaureate Students

“…This has been confirmed in previous studies with secondary school students (Akbari et al, 2014;Jamshidi et al, 2018). In the same vein, Liu et al (2020) confirmed that psychological resilience and emotion regulation can predict emerging test anxiety. In contrast to these studies, Sakka et al (2020) denied the correlation between test anxiety and resilience among secondary school students.…”

“…Resilience in the academic context has been the subject study of many researchers, who approached the issue within its relationship to test anxiety, and as an anxiety predictive mediator variable, both for university students (Gaber & Ali, 2016;Hayat et al, 2021;Hye Sook & Ya Ki, 2014;Liu et al, 2020), and among secondary school students (Akbari et al, 2014;Jamshidi et al, 2018). In this regard, the study carried out by De La Fuente et al (2017) considers that high levels of self-regulation create a high level of resilience among university students, as it is a potential mediating variable to face pressure and stress.…”

“…In the same vein, Trigueros et al (2020) revealed that resilience negatively predicts test anxiety and academic stress among university students. The research (Clipa et al, 2021) showed that there is a relationship between test anxiety and psychological resilience based on the subject's gender, Liu et al (2020) found that gender and academic performance are significantly correlated with test anxiety, emotion regulation, and psychological resilience.…”