Research article
Failure cue priming and impaired cognitive performance—analyses of avoidance motivation as a mediator and fear of failure as a moderator
Julia Schüler,
Veronika Brandstätter,
Nicola Baumann,
Corresponding Author
Julia Schüler
University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Correspondence to: PD Dr. Julia Schüler, University of Bern, Bremgartenstrasse 145, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
E-mail: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorVeronika Brandstätter
University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Search for more papers by this authorNicola Baumann
Department of Psychology, University of Trier, Trier, Germany
Search for more papers by this authorJulia Schüler,
Veronika Brandstätter,
Nicola Baumann,
Corresponding Author
Julia Schüler
University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Correspondence to: PD Dr. Julia Schüler, University of Bern, Bremgartenstrasse 145, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
E-mail: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorVeronika Brandstätter
University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Search for more papers by this authorNicola Baumann
Department of Psychology, University of Trier, Trier, Germany
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
The present research investigates whether and how learned symbols for failure reduce task performance. We tested the effect of number priming in two countries with different learning histories for numbers. Priming numbers associated with failure (6 in Germany and 1 in Switzerland) were hypothesized to reduce performance. As expected, in Switzerland, priming with the failure number 1 reduced performance (Study 1), whereas in Germany, priming with the failure number 6 impaired performance in analogy tasks (Study 2). Study 2 additionally analyzed the mechanism and showed that the relationship between failure number priming and performance was mediated by evoked avoidance motivation and that dispositional fear of failure moderated this mediation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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