Research on anxiety and motivation has witnessed substantial progress in recent years in developing innovative perspectives and applying advanced psychometric tools. The most important contributions were made by cognitively oriented psychologists who have related the information processing view to anxiety and motivation. The organized knowledge about oneself and the storage, processing and retrieval of information concerned with one's attitude and behavior strongly influences the way people think, feel and act. Therefore, self-referent thoughts play a major role as a cognitive component in anxiety and motivation. It is the idea of this book to integrate different lines of thinking in the field of anxiety and motivation by relating both topics to self-focussed attention, self-concept and self-evaluation in achievement contexts as well as in social contexts.
