Anxiety Awareness among IIUM Students
English for Academic Writing
LE 4000 Section 37
Date: 5th December 2014
Abstract
Anxiety refers to the unnecessary unpleasant feeling of dread over current or future events that might or might not happen. People with anxiety usually have a sense of worry, fear or muscle tension. The purpose of this study aims to investigate the level of awareness of anxiety among IIUM students. The objectives were to indicate whether the students are aware of social anxiety that might be suffered by them and the most common factor that contributes to feeling anxious. Questionnaires were distributed to thirty randomly selected individuals in IIUM. Paper-based ...view middle of the document...
According to UK statistics, the age group that shows the highest level of anxiety is between 35 to 59 years old, the middle age group. It is also estimated that about 3.3% of children and young adults in UK suffer from anxiety. There are many different types of anxiety that people can suffer from. They are social anxiety, test anxiety, stranger anxiety and also stage fright. If the anxiety feeling in a person prolongs, one might suffer from anxiety disorder. Some might say that anxiety disorder can be genetic.
People with anxiety usually tend to feel negative and constantly worry about unforeseeable events and this can affect their social life in general. Some might confuse anxiety with shyness but actually, anxiety is more serious than what people perceive. When the feeling of anxiety is too much too handle, it can take over someone’s thinking and this affect not only their social life, but also their work productivity as it is hard to focus and concentrate and also their relationships with friends and family.
According to Greca and Lopez (1998), some of the factors that can lead to anxiety are fear of negative evaluation, social avoidance and distress in general and lastly, avoidance specific to new situations or unfamiliar peers. Fear of negative evaluation is when a person worries about what others think of them. The person constantly thinks that people are going to say negative things about him that whenever he engages in any social behaviour thus can cause a person to feel anxious. The second factor as mentioned by Greca and Lopez (1998) was social avoidance and distress in general whereby a person is naturally quiet whenever he is with a group of people, even when the group of people are people who he knows very well. The third and last factor is avoidance specific to new situations and unfamiliar peers (Greca and Lopez, 1998). One of the situations where a person might feel this way is when he gets nervous when meeting new people.
As mentioned by Barlow (2002), “anxiety is viewed as a complex construct that consists of three components: cognitive, behavioural, and physiological.” The first component is when a person is affected by the negative perception from others and fears that he might be judged. Behavioural component on the other hand refers to “the degree to which an individual avoids or escapes from an anxiety-provoking situation (Claire et al., 2009).” Physiological components include the symptoms of anxiety that can be felt by the person, for example, sweating, heart palpitation and blushing.
Woodruff et al. (2014) describes the people with anxiety to be negatively affected when being percept by people especially when the person fails to deliver up to the expected standards of the audience. People’s anxiety “increases as individuals perceive greater discrepancy between the audience’s expectations and their own self-representation (Woodruff et al., 2014).”
According to a study made by Mishra and Suar (2011), the...
