Anxiety and Listening 9
empty system, as in the first few items heard in a listening
task. As a listening task continues, an ever growing backlog of
information to be remembered and processed is compiled.
Maintenance rehearsal of items encountered early in the task is
retarded by the introduction of later items (retroactive
interference) while the retention of later items is difficult as
attempts at maintenance rehearsal functions as a distractor
(proactive interference, Greene, 1992; Rundus, 1980). The
listener, meanwhile, is fully aware that the memory burden is
continually growing. As a result, it is expected that anxiety
levels will increase over the duration of a listening task.
Based upon the preceding discussion, the following research
questions are posited.
H1: State anxiety levels will be low prior to a listening
task, steadily increasing during the task, and decrease
significantly following the task.
Another important variable in message processing is affect,
or general liking, for the task. King and Behnke (2000)
demonstrated that affect and communication load interact in
explaining performance for several types of listening tasks,
including short-term memory and interpretation of meaning in
conversations. The researchers failed to find an interaction
between affect and load in predicting performance on a task
involving long-term recall. This is unexpected given the
Convention