Anxiety and Performance in High-Achieving Adolescents: Associations Among 8 General and Specific Anxiety Measures and 13 School Grades

PsyCh Journal. 2026. Vol. 15. No. 2. Article e70088.

Maxim Likhanov, Alenina E., Bloniewski T., Zhou X., Kovas Y.

Despite years of research, the links between domain-general and domain-specific anxieties (e.g., social), as well as their linkswith academic performance in different domains remain poorly understood. The current study explores anxiety-academic per-formance associations across eight domain-general and domain-specific anxiety measures (tapping into trait, state, maths, spa-tial, and social anxiety, worry, and anxiety sensitivity, as well as symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, GAD) and 13 schoolsubjects in a large (N = ~800) sample of schoolchildren (Mage = 15.26), selected for high achievement in STEM, Arts, Sports, andLiterature. Our data showed that all anxiety measures load onto single general anxiety factor, explaining 51% of variance; andsuggesting substantive amount of unique variance in each measure. Regression analysis showed that domain-general anxiety(e.g., trait anxiety and GAD symptoms) did not explain much variance in academic outcomes, while domain-specific anxietyexplained variance in respective domains. For example, maths anxiety was linked with Algebra and Geometry performance. Theresults demonstrated that the negative link between anxiety and performance is present even in adolescents with high academicachievement (i.e., adolescents with high achievement in STEM) and this link is of small-to-medium effect size. Interestingly,worry scale correlated positively with performance after controlling for other anxiety measures, probably reflecting this measuretapping into some motivational and/or arousal aspects of anxiety. The study provides new insights into anxiety-performancelinks that can be used for further development of measures and educational interventions.

Keywords: факторный анализ, academic performance, академическая успешность, factor analysis, general anxiety, specific anxiety, общая тревожность, специфичная тревожность, school grades, школьные оценки