Browsing by Author "Saarelma, Joel"

Goals: Anxiety symptoms during adolescence are highly prevalent and correlate with poor academic outcomes. Despite the effects reported in prior review literature being negative on average, the results of different studies have great heterogeneity, leaving room for deeper investigation of the direction and causality of the effects between anxiety and academic achievement. This narrative review aims to synthesize the findings of recent longitudinal studies on the subject. Methods: A narrative review of seven articles on several different measures of anxiety as predictors of academic achievement during adolescence, measured in grades, education continuity and graduation. Results: Several different measures of anxiety symptoms, including social anxiety, PTSD, test anxiety, and generalized anxiety symptoms, are predictive of poor academic grades in adolescence, even when other mental health problems are controlled for. Anxiety is linked to a lower chance of college graduation but there may be no independent effect over that of depression. There appear to be cascading, long-term links between different anxiety symptoms and academic outcomes, some of them bi-directional, making longitudinal designs and repeated measures of multiple variables recommendable for future research. Most effects appear to be gender-non-specific, but effect strengths do seem to vary between groups of low and high anxiety, hinting at a possibly curvilinear relationship worth investigating.