Revista de Investigaciones Universidad del Quindío,

34(S3), 6-14; 2022.

ISSN: 1794-631X e-ISSN: 2500-5782

Esta obra está bajo una licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional.

DIAGNOSIS OF TEENAGER’S PERSONAL ANXIETY IN EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES

DIAGNÓSTICO DE LA ANSIEDAD PERSONAL DEL ADOLESCENTE EN LAS ACTIVIDADES EDUCATIVAS

Aminova D.K.1*; Skoblikova T.V.2; Latipov Z.A.3; Listik E.M.4; Kurganova E.A.5

1. Dagestan State Pedagogical University, Russia. tsahaeva@rambler.ru

2. Southwestern State University, Russia. skoblikova-t@mail.ru

3. Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, Russia. zagir05@mail.ru

4. Moscow City Pedagogical University, Russia. elena.listik@mail.ru

5. Moscow City Pedagogical University, Russia. e_kurg@mail.ru

* Corresponding author: Aminova D.K., e-mail: tsahaeva@rambler.ru

ABSTRACT

The paper provides a theoretical and analytical review of modern methods of diagnosing anxiety states and personal anxiety, which have been used by Russian scientists in recent years. The paper presents the arguments of scientists about the nature and psychological and pedagogical characteristics of personal anxiety as a property of personality, mental state and character traits. The paper describes the scientific apparatus and methodological tools of diagnostic procedures. The methods used in the study (observation, survey, analysis of the products of educational activity, Spielberg-Khanin’s method of personal and situational anxiety, the J. Taylor’s method of measuring the level of anxiety, the method “Multidimensional assessment of child anxiety” (MACA), statistical methods of data processing are highlighted and the empirical results are discussed. The results indicat that it is necessary to separate the scientific concepts of anxiety and uneasiness as non-fundamental and having a different psychological and physiological basis.

Keywords: Personality, Teenager, Educational activity, Personal anxiety (Pa), Situational anxiety (SA).

RESUMEN

El artículo proporciona una revisión teórica y analítica de los métodos modernos de diagnóstico de estados de ansiedad y ansiedad personal, que han sido utilizados por científicos rusos en los últimos años. El artículo presenta los argumentos de los científicos sobre la naturaleza y las características psicológicas y pedagógicas de la ansiedad personal como una propiedad de la personalidad, el estado mental y los rasgos del carácter. El artículo describe el aparato científico y las herramientas metodológicas de los procedimientos de diagnóstico. Los métodos utilizados en el estudio (observación, encuesta, análisis de los productos de la actividad educativa, el método de ansiedad personal y situacional de Spielberg-Khanin, el método de J. Taylor para medir el nivel de ansiedad, el método "Evaluación multidimensional de la ansiedad infantil" (MACA), se destacan los métodos estadísticos de procesamiento de datos y se discuten los resultados empíricos, los cuales indican que es necesario separar los conceptos científicos de ansiedad y malestar como no fundamentales y con diferente base psicológica y fisiológica.

Palabras clave: Personalidad, Adolescente, Actividad educativa, Ansiedad personal (Pa), Ansiedad situacional (SA).

INTRODUCTION

The spring of 2020 once again showed the world, the entire population of the Earth, that our health is the greatest value. Good health is the main condition for the realization of vital functions, the basis for the survival of mankind. The coronavirus pandemic has forced almost all countries of the world to isolate students, and the application of quarantine measures has changed the form and content of education. The ever-increasing number of victims and helpless before the virus Covid-19, the unequal combat viral enemy led to the destruction of some groups of population mental health and increased personal anxiety (Cost et al. 2022). The developments of foreign scientists are relevant (Bélair et al., 2018). Especially in such alarming times for a person, it is important to study the manifestations of personal anxiety, which is what Russian teachers and psychologists have been doing (Bernaras et al., 2019).

The topic of using personal anxiety of athletes to improve their sports performance has been successfully developed for a long time. Dozens of articles, monographs and dissertations were defended and published, and an overview of some of them is presented below. Dale et al. (2019) studies the personal determinants of anxiety of young people engaged in acrobatics and notes that they have gender differences. The authors attribute anxiety to the category of mental states, while selecting synonymous series of anxiety for it, whereas this is a completely different definition. Including the subjective feeling of tension, anxiety, excitement, fear, activity of the central and peripheral nervous system of a person. Disturbed attention, weak concentration of mental energy provokes situational anxiety. Cost et al. (2022) compares the diagnosis of such anxiety with a one-time “photo” of the mental background of the individual, while its level changes correlate with the degree of danger and the assessment of the source of this danger.

A number of authors study the phenomenon of anxiety in the categories of personal properties, such as the willingness to be anxious. This opinion is supported by Courtney et al. (2020), studying the features of the game in eliminating the anxiety of schoolchildren. The author also makes semantic parallels of the terms anxiety and uneasiness, where the latter is considered a discretely variable manifestation of a personality property, such as uneasiness, situational fears and anxieties that have a blocking response of the psyche. At the same time, it is possible to process and transform this state into other qualities. “Such a child can outwardly make an impression with the deceased and even self-confident, but the task of the teacher is to learn to recognize anxiety and “under the mask”. Feiss et al. (2019) emphasizes the indicators of personal anxiety as characteristic character traits that manifest themselves in panic, everyday panic anxiety and experiences that are not supported by objective reality, unaccountable fears, unconfirmed threats, and dangers. Geyikci et al. (2018) argues about the negative impact of anxiety on socialization, as the attitude to the hostility of the world blocks the perception of it and the acceptance of the norms of society, and also identifies as the causes of aggressive behavior. Bernaras et al. (2019) identified the relationship between the level of personal anxiety and the motivation of students’ learning activities and proposed a classification of motivations for learning activities. Dividing the motivation of students’ learning activities into external and internal, negative and positive, the authors noted that in the absence or weak expression of learning ability, positive motivation acts as a compensatory factor. While situational anxiety caused by external conditions can be diagnosed by questioning and observation. The diagnosis of personal anxiety is difficult to recognize visually. This is a deeply hidden characteristic of the mental state. It provokes constant alertness, depressed mood, hostility, tension. But the average personal anxiety helps to adapt more quickly to the new conditions of educational activity, if necessary, signaling a threat (Cost et al. 2022).

Hart Abney et al. (2019) in the study of the level of anxiety and stress resistance does not make a special difference between the definition of stress and anxiety, explaining that an athlete during the competition needs both doping stress and high anxiety, regardless of gender. The athlete uses a coping strategy to overcome anxiety. Bélair et al. (2018) identifies anxiety as a psychological aspect of the adaptation of first-graders to school. The author does not distinguish between uneasiness and anxiety in her research, often replacing these terms with each other, which is puzzling, as each specific situation is individually recognized by the person and depends on the type of temperament, character, attitudes, social experience, self-esteem, etc. Juruena et al. (2020) proved that anxiety experiences depend on the mental status of the individual, the level of development of the emotional-volitional sphere. What matters is frustration and the need to succeed. If a tense situation is escalated for a long time, then success and high educational results are impossible for children with personal anxiety. Melnyk (2020) identified the main aspects of the study of the problem of uneasiness and anxiety in psychology and associated them with a sense of emotional tension. The authors observed psychosomatic disorders of anxious individuals, frequent complaints of poor health and the need for social isolation. Perhaps this isolation plays the role of psychological protection, “avoiding the destruction of illusions”. Scientists consider school anxiety to be a specific type. In primary school age, it is disorganizing and maladaptive in nature. But “the positive side of anxiety is that it allows a person to understand better the emotional state of other people, intuitively feel their mood and anticipate how they will behave in a particular situation. Anxiety, as it were, sharpens a person’s reactions, strengthens his observation skills, contributes to the formation of the necessary knowledge and skills, and also helps to adapt to changing living conditions”.

Due to the peculiarities of psychophysiological development, the main psych emotional destructive impact was received by the adolescent age group. In the paper “The development of anxiety in adolescents brought up in families with different social status”, the main focus is on the social impact of family education. It is noted that education in single-parent families provokes the development of personal anxiety, as there is no complete gender-projected influence on the child’s psyche, there is no harmony and integrity of the social role of both parents, where in “families with one parent, children are deprived of such love, support and assistance they do not receive in such a volume as children from mixed families”. McGuine et al. (2021) uses methods of active socio-pedagogical training of interpersonal interactions as psychological and pedagogical support for adolescents with an increased level of anxiety. In the psychodiagnostic block, there are corrective training techniques that reduce the level of tension and anxiety. The author uses art-pedagogical technologies of dance-motor tasks and receives positive dynamics of neutralization of anxiety. Pluhar et al. (2019) also identifies school anxiety as a specific type of anxiety in students and focuses on the specificity of the interaction of a teenager with the educational environment. Shuai et al. (2021), studying the relationship between emotional intelligence and the level of anxiety in adolescents, came to the conclusion that there are significant differences in the level of anxiety in persons with a high index of tension, excessive anxiety, emotional instability, the presence of any fear. The authors say “the development of emotional intelligence contributes to the fact that a teenager can understand the cause of their negative emotions, adequately assess the situation and take it under control”.

In the arsenal of diagnostic procedures, the method “Multidimensional assessment of children’s anxiety” (MACA) has appeared and is actively used by scientists, which divides anxiety states into several stages and types, which helps to clarify and individualize them. Monitoring the pedagogical conditions of personal development of adolescents and the removal of their anxiety in educational activities, Ströhle et al. (2018) came to the conclusion that some types of anxiety reduce the potential of personal development, and others - on the contrary. The author presented a package of diagnostic methods that reflect the pace of development, individual educational routes. Drawing parallels with the level of a teenager’s resilience, the author came to the conclusion about the creation of special psychological and pedagogical conditions that contribute to avoiding the problem zone of anxiety, and for this it is necessary to enrich and positively emotionally saturate the consciousness of a teenager with positive images of the world. It is important to develop the skills of coping with their own worries and fears (Keles et al., 2020). Thus, it can be stated that modern scientists are concerned about the problem of personal anxiety and they are actively developing its psychological, pedagogical, and social aspects.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The team of authors, united by a common idea: to collect and analyze the results of the diagnosis of the level of personal anxiety of a teenager and its impact on the process of educational activity, was assembled thanks to a professional group on Facebook, consists of teachers and psychologists-representatives of various regions of Russia. Therefore, the research is based on online communities grouped by age (teenagers) and interests. Educational activity is the object of our research, it took place in a remote mode, personal anxiety of a teenager is the subject of research. The sample included 213 people, aged from 11 to 13 years. Having agreed on the relevance, objectives, and effectiveness of the diagnostic material, the authors of this paper came to a unanimous decision to use the Spielberg-Hanin method of personal and situational anxiety, which reveals the level of reactive and personal anxiety; the method of J. Taylor, that measures the level of anxiety. The method “Multidimensional assessment of children’s anxiety” (MACA) was also used, which included ten scales that scanned “general anxiety”, “anxiety in relationships”, “assessments of me by others”, “relationships with teachers”, “relationships with parents”, “educational success”, “self-expression”, “situations with tests”, “decreased mental activity due to anxiety”, “increased vegetative reactivity due to anxiety”. Analysis of the statistical data of assessment of the level of personal anxiety directly related to the personal characteristics of the child; the peculiarities of the physiological and psychovegetative forms of behavioral reactions; the specificity of interaction of a teenager with peers and adults; particular manifestations of anxiety during the actual training activities helped to create the complex system characteristics of personal anxiety of each individual psycho-pedagogical profile, which was recorded in a personal card of a teenager. The presence of an individual psychological and pedagogical portrait of the manifestation and creation of an anxious emotional status helped us to choose a program not only for studying, but also for further correctional work on the personal and anxious state that prevents a teenager from learning and showing high results.

To determine the quality and characteristics of a teenager’s learning activities, we studied the products of their activities, interviewed subject teachers, and school psychologists.

RESULTS

Our study aimed to assess the relationship between the data of personal anxiety and the success of educational activities of adolescents.

The diagnosis was carried out with the permission of the parents. All teenagers received distance learning according to standard curricula, but a certain difficulty in distance learning, as noted by the teenagers themselves, their parents and teachers, was high personal anxiety, which was observed at the very beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in Russia. The study was conducted in several stages:

1. Preparing teenagers and grouping the sample on Facebook.
2. Diagnosis of personal anxiety.
3. Analysis of the educational activities of each teenager, conversations with teachers and parents.
4. Identification of the correlation between the data of personal anxiety and the success of educational activities.

   
   Diagnosis of personal anxiety according to the method of J. Taylor in the whole sample, showed the dominance of the average level of personal anxiety.

Figure 1. Results of the study according to the method of J. Taylor.

Thus, we observe from Figure 1 that the majority of subjects are more characterized by the average level of anxiety, while the average level with a tendency to low is (43.3%), and with a tendency to high (36.7%). Also, among young people with a small percentage, those who have a high level of anxiety (16.7%) are distinguished, and only (3.3%) indicates a low level. The study found a positive correlation between the components of social and personal anxiety. Let us consider in more detail the example of twelve-year-old A.M., who lives with his mother and grandmother in Makhachkala. Figure 2 shows his anxiety indicators in dynamics, where the 1st row (low) is the beginning of self-isolation in March-April 2020, the second row (medium) fell in May-August 2020, when he infected his grandmother, and then his mother with a Covid infection and his grandmother died as a result of complications in early August 2020. The third cross-section was made in December 2020 and showed an average level of anxiety, which can be explained by the presence of emotional burnout and a large number of deaths from Covid (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Distribution of the entire sample by PA and SA levels.

From the analysis of the ratio of situational to personal anxiety, we can note that the respondents have an expressed average level of anxiety on both scales. For example, the indicators of personal anxiety of the average level in percentage terms are (70%), while with a high degree of anxiety (16.7%), and with a low degree of anxiety (13.3%). According to the results of the table we can say that the indicators of situational anxiety average level is (66.7%), low (10%), and high (23.3%). As a result, the results of the subjects are almost equally characterized by the presence of an average level of both situational and personal anxiety. By the method of observation, survey and analysis of the products of educational activity we determined such indicators of success of training activities as the efficiency of solution of educational tasks, positive motivation, high evaluation of knowledge, accuracy of homework, the ability to demonstrate their KAS, positive relations with classmates, positive attitudes toward school, positive image of I-student, mental creative autonomy, appropriately positive self-appraisal of training activities, assessment of performance, sense of security and well-being. We evaluated them on a 10-point scale and conducted a correlation analysis of their relationship with the characteristics of an anxious personality. To identify correlations between the data of personal anxiety and the success of educational activities, we used the correlation analysis procedure (according to Pearson). The obtained correlation coefficients are significant at the level of 1% (p < 0.01). The results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Correlation coefficients between the data of personal anxiety and the success of educational activities.

Educational activity	Characteristics of personal anxiety
	anxiety	tension	worry	fussiness	nervousness	feeling of uncertainty	feeling of helplessness	feeling of powerlessness	sense of insecurity	feeling of loneliness
Efficiency of solving the training task	0.57	-0.19	0.61	0.48	0.71	0.45	0.40	0.42	0.48	0.53
Positive motivation of learning	0.86	-0.10	0.79	0.86	0.83	0.84	0.75	0.67	0.85	0.85
High knowledge scores	0.88	-0.11	0.75	0.84	0.88	0.83	0.84	0.83	0.88	0.84
Accuracy of homework completion	0.59	-0.20	0.77	0.70	0.81	0.59	0.55	0.55	0.60	0.73
Ability to demonstrate their KAS	-0.50	0.09	-0.35	-0.35	-0.51	-0.30	-0.41	-0.45	-0.38	-0.31
Positive relations with classmates	0.65	-0.19	0.82	0.75	0.86	0.66	0.53	0.45	0.62	0.79
Positive attitude towards school	0.86	-0.18	0.67	0.72	0.87	0.79	0.85	0.90	0.88	0.74
Positive image of I-student	0.84	-0.30	0.72	0.60	0.82	0.66	0.57	0.65	0.70	0.62
Mental creative independence	0.84	-0.27	0.74	0.66	0.86	0.73	0.72	0.74	0.73	0.69
Adequately positive self-assessment of academic activities	0.65	-0.20	0.57	0.58	0.81	0.48	0.50	0.50	0.53	0.62
Academic performance assessments	0.58	-0.14	0.66	0.61	0.84	0.52	0.50	0.45	0.52	0.74
A sense of security and well-being	0.81	-0.23	0.59	0.57	0.79	0.58	0.62	0.58	0.58	0.69

Note: significant indicators are highlighted in red in the table.

As it can be seen from Table 1, there are quite a lot of statistically significant high indicators of the relationship between these parameters. At the same time, it is clear that the characteristics of educational activity do not correlate with any characteristics of personal anxiety; there is no relationship between the indicators of the level of anxiety and the assessment of academic performance (0.14). And between.... as an educational process and the characteristic of the state of anxiety during the performance of the educational task, no significant connections were found.

DISCUSSION

Having analyzed the results of the research work, we can indicate. First, the acquired data negates the hypothesis put forward in the provided study. Judging by the results obtained, the degree of anxiety of the average teenager is at the average level of its manifestation. However, low anxiety, although it predisposes some indifference or “thick skin”, can itself be a reflection of religious upbringing and philosophical attitude to reality. 12% of our respondents answered a clarifying question about their calm attitude to information about death from Covid-19 as inevitability and a foregone conclusion of everyone’s going aloft. In contrast, the study of these relationships revealed the correlation of situational and personal anxiety with such personality traits as cowardice, emotional deafness, insensitivity, selfishness, etc. There was a positive association between anxiety and aggressiveness, anxiety and group cohesion. But at the same time, the same teenager in different situations was dominated by different types of anxiety.

We identified the components of personal anxiety. They are insecurity, loss of clear understanding, anxiety, tension, worry, restlessness, nervousness, uncertainty, feelings of helplessness, feelings of powerlessness, insecurity, and loneliness. Secondly, we found that adolescents from rural areas are more prone to personal anxiety; this may be due to the fact that during the period of danger of Covid infection, distance from the medical care center exposes the lives of loved ones and themselves to particular danger. Especially, the graduates of the 9th grade were worried that they would not be able to enter colleges due to restrictions in movement, they did not understand how to pass the BSE remotely. All this caused an increase in the level of anxiety of adolescents, which was manifested in educational activities.

CONCLUSION

The diagnosis of personal anxiety of a teenager in educational activities should be of a complex and systematic nature and have a practical output to the correctional and developmental program of personality formation. In order to neutralize the negative impact of personal anxiety on the success of educational activities, we used reflexive exercises. With the help of the reflexive essay “I -...”, the teenager learned to express his emotions adequately, understand the feelings of other people, develop his empathy, as well as acquire knowledge, abilities and skills of positive, friendly communication. Through personal conversations with the group psychologist, personal anxieties and fears were voiced, worked out, and a joint search for a way to neutralize them. Using art-therapeutic techniques in working with personal anxiety of a teenager, we significantly reduced the level of anxiety, developed an adequate positive self-assessment of the educational activity of a teenager, and helped to realize their problems. And the elements of the training using the artistic abilities of the teenager (playing scenes of high anxiety and possible conflict) helped to reduce the level of this anxiety. These psychological and pedagogical influences were applied to adolescents from the group with a high level of personal anxiety, of which there were 13 people. For them, anxiety turned out to be the cause of a social voluntary reclusive life, using or hiding behind the need for social isolation, such people lead themselves to desocialization and self-destruction. This is a special risk group that all psychological and pedagogical support services must work with individually.

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