anxiety hurts smart people more

researchers have speculated that male and female aptitude test scores diverge because women are more influenced by test anxiety. a recent study at my alma mater finds that brainpower matters, too when it comes to the effects of anxiety:

...testing anxiety reduces the ability of very smart people to tap into what experts call their "working memory capacity."

These highly intelligent test-takers choked under pressure, losing their advantage over normally less-adept participants. On the other hand, stress didn't seem to affect the scores of less intelligent participants.

as working memory is the amount of information one can hold and process at a given time, intelligence and working memory have been inexorably linked. those with a large working memory tend to rely on this ability, whereas those without may rely on other strategies. so when stress decreases working memory abilities, the more intelligent feel it the most. this handicap shows that the standard view of intelligence reported on IQ tests is unable to fully predict performance.

"The bottom line," Gray said, "is that there's a lot more to what it means to be a person than raw computational power. If you think about that as being intelligence, that's a limited view."

so does this study, combined with the previous gender study, indicate that smart women are doubly screwed? perhaps, but the good news is that rehearsing the test can help prevent anxiety, and bulking up on skills such as educated guessing can help when anxiety does prevent your ability to work things out in your head.

update: just adding reference below.

source: beilock, s. l. and carr, t. h. when high-powered people fail: working memory and "choking under pressure" in math. psychological science 16, 2