Emotional intersection: Delineating test anxiety, emotional disorders, and student well-being

Previous studies have shown how test anxiety is positively related to symptoms of emotion disorder and that highly test anxious persons can meet diagnostic thresholds for emotion disorder. However, many studies are somewhat dated and based on older conceptualizations of key constructs. In addition, well-being is rarely considered alongside test anxiety and emotion disorder. In the present study, we addressed this limitation by using contemporaneous conceptualizations of test anxiety and emotion disorder, alongside school-related well-being (SRWB), using two analytic methods that are rarely combined to establish how constructs are related. The sample comprised 1167 participants (n_male = 500, n_female = 621, n_non-binary = 21, n_{declined to report} = 25; M_age = 15.4 years, SD = 1.81) from secondary and upper secondary education. Data were analyzed using psychometric network analysis and receiver-operator characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. The psychometric network analysis showed that test anxiety, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, social anxiety, major depression, and SRWB formed distinct and largely coherent communities. Generalized anxiety was principally linked to the worry and tension components of test anxiety, panic disorder to the physiological indicator's component, social anxiety and SRWB to the worry and cognitive interference components, and major depression to the cognitive interference component. The ROC curve analysis indicated that test anxiety scores from the 63rd to 75th scale percentiles could predict clinical risk with relatively high accuracy (0.79–0.88) and acceptable levels of sensitivity (0.75–0.86) and specificity (0.70–0.77). Results suggest that test anxiety, emotion disorder, and SRWB are distinct, albeit related constructs. Although constrained by the cross-sectional design, our findings suggest that high test anxiety presents an elevated risk for the development of emotion disorder.