Emotional inteligence

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person will eventually fail in training or in the field. The
anxious are more likely to fail even given superior scores
on intelligence tests, as a study of 1,790 students in
training for air traffic control posts discovered. 12 Anxiety
also sabotages academic performance of all kinds: 126
different studies of more than 36,000 people found that
the more prone to worries a person is, the poorer their
academic performance, no matter how measured—grades
on tests, grade-point average, or achievement
tests. 13
When people who are prone to worry are asked to perform
a cognitive task such as sorting ambiguous objects
into one of two categories, and narrate what is going
through their mind as they do so, it is the negative
thoughts—"I won't be able to do this," "I'm just no good
at this kind of test," and the like—that are found to most
directly disrupt their decision-making. Indeed, when a
comparison group of nonworriers was asked to worry on
purpose for fifteen minutes, their ability to do the same
task deteriorated sharply. And when the worriers were
given a fifteen-minute relaxation session—which reduced
their level of worrying—before trying the task,
they had no problem with it. 14
Test anxiety was first studied scientifically in the
1960s by Richard Alpert, who confessed to me that his
interest was piqued because as a student his nerves