Facebook ‘likes’ may help reduce exam anxiety: Study

Washington: Reading supportive comments, 'likes' and messages from Facebook friends just before taking an exam may help anxious students reduce their nervousness and improve test scores, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Illinois in the US found that undergraduate students with high levels of test anxiety who sought support from their online friends and read the messages prior to a simulated exam reduced their anxiety levels by 21 per cent.

These students, and peers who performed a seven-minute expressive-writing exercise, were able to perform as well on a set of computer programming exercises as students who had low levels of test anxiety, said Robert Deloatch, a graduate student at the university.

Up to 41 per cent of students are estimated to suffer from test anxiety, which is a combination of physiological and emotional responses that occur while preparing for and taking tests. Test anxiety is linked to lower test scores and grade point averages, as well as poor performance on memory and problem-solving tasks.

Students with high test anxiety strongly fear negative evaluation, have lower self-esteem and tend to experience increased numbers of distracting and irrelevant thoughts in testing situations, according to the study.

"We found that only the students who received supportive messages from their Facebook network showed a significant decrease in anxiety and an increase in their performance on our simulated exam," Deloatch said.