Introduction

POSTERS

These two posters have been selected from those presented at the 16th International Congress of Behavioral Medicine Medicine: “Interdisciplinary behavioral medicine: systems, network and interventions”, held in Glasgow in June 2021.

ANXIETY TESTING: FROM LITERATURE REVIEW TO DESIGNING A TRANS-DIAGNOSTIC TREATMENT PROGRAM

Aims. Test anxiety is a psychological condition that has relevant consequences on epidemiological and clinical grounds. People experiencing test anxiety suffer from high levels of distress in different kinds of testing situations. This paper analyses available empirical evidence addressing the efficacy of psychotherapy programs aimed at reducing test anxiety symptoms and describes the variables that have positive effects in the treatment of test anxiety.
Method. A literature search has been performed in order to identify both the variables most frequently used in the treatment of test anxiety and the evidence based efficacy of test anxiety intervention programs.
Results. The present review included 9 papers describing test anxiety interventions conducted in various geographical and cultural contexts. The selected interventions were focused on the relation between test anxiety and the following variables: procrastination, self-efficacy, self-esteem, learning skills deficits, cognitive biases, perfectionism. The majority of intervention programs had a short duration, from a minimum of 2 sessions to a maximum of 12 sessions, were mostly articulated in weekly sessions and were based on cognitive-behavioural theories, models and techniques.
Conclusion. The analysed programs were found to have positive effects on the reduction of test anxiety symptoms. However, the present review reveals that researchers in the field do not agree about what variables have to be specifically addressed in test anxiety treatments and about what are the process that determine and maintain such a disorder.

Historical Archive

Vic Meyer, of Polish origin, was a British psychologist at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School of the University of London (now UCL Medical School) and is considered the “spiritual father” of clinical case formulation, an approach to understanding complex psychiatric problems using learning principles derived from experimental psychological research and idiographically adapted to the individual case to develop an effective intervention regimen.