Nominal and real group performance in relation to manifest anxiety and induced stress

Female college students were selected on the basis of their scores on the Manifest Anxiety Scale. The participants worked either alone or in pairs on a multiple-solution anagrams task. The experiment had a 2 × 2 × 2 design, with group type (nominal versus real), manifest anxiety (low versus high), and induced stress (low versus high) as the three variables. The results indicated that increased anxiety and stress were relatively more detrimental to the performance of real groups as compared with nominal groups.