A Study on Relationship of Self Confidence & Anxiety of General Mental Ability With Actualisation and Non Actualisation

Life is becoming fast with the advancement of science and technology. Though man has conquered time and space to great extent by the present level of scientific advancement, yet there is great threat to his existence. The Indian society is becoming increasingly materialistic. Emotional and social pressure is increasing day by day especially at high school stage. In all circles of life, distress, anxiety and frustrations take place. Parents don't have time to spend and coordinate their children. Students are frequently troubled with their daily problems because they do not have the capacity and training to solve problems. Our educational system also provides no direction to the children. In this modern world of science and technology, nothing but change is eternal. This generation of our own is inhabiting the kindness of innovation and science. It is accepted that the 'solum bunum' of our lives is science-based innovation. In addition, in all social statuses, there is a ton of competition. Darwin 's law of survival for the fittest is truly valid here. Only the individuals who are effective will endure. This rapid change in man's life due to advancement in scientific technology has made man's life easy and comfortable but at the same time has created many complexities too. Apparently, man appears to be happy but internally, he is full of conflicts. Parents and educational institutions are constraining children to dominate in academia and different areas of performance. Test anxiety has been investigated for a long time, however it continues to be a genuine educational issue. Researchers note that as long as testing advancements are utilized to assess academic achievement, the test anxiety phenomenon will be relevant (1, 2).

Begum and Phukan (2005) undertook the study in English medium schools at Jorhal district of Assam following the syllabus of C.B.S.E., New Delhi. The sample was consisted of 180 students of class IX, out of which 118 were males and 62 were females. A significant positive correlation (r= .70) between academic achievement and understudy knowledge has been watched. Significant differences were observed between the students of high and the low academic achievers in respect to their intelligence scores obtained in the intelligence test (3). Kaur, H. (2004) in her study found non-significant correlation between emotional maturity and self-confidence of adolescents. However, study reported significant differences in the emotional maturity of adolescents of rural and urban areas (4). The relation of the criterion variable academic achievement with the three indicator variables insight , social economic status, and adolescent adjustment was investigated by Ahmad and Raheem (2003). Knowledge is discovered to be the most important factor in the field of academic achievement. But the contribution of socio-economic status and adjustment can be neglected (5). Babo (2001) studied on a sample of 178 eighth grade middle school students (93 students enrolled in instrumental music and 85 students in noninstrumental music programme) during the 1998-99 academic year. The research design analysed testing data from the California Achievement Test

academic achievement (6). Test anxiety and academic achievement of understudies in material science are investigated by Elanka Thirselvan (2000) and Kumar's Ellakka, B. Sample of this study comprise 530 higher secondary students studying Physics. Sharma's test anxiety scale was used in this study. The results revealed that 1. The test anxiety was higher for the girls than that of boys. 2. The mean scores of achievement in Physics was higher for the girls than that of boys, the students of A groups was higher than that of the students of B group, the students studying in English medium was higher than that of the students in Tamil medium. 3. The relationship between the test anxiety and achievement marks in Physics in respect of all the sub samples are not significant (7).

Outside of psychological research, self-confidence is probably the most utilized term for these associated concepts, however there is still some confusion about exactly what self-confidence is. It is alluded to as just trusting in oneself, one of the most refered to wellsprings of self-confidence (8). Another popular article portrays self-confidence as the performance expectations of an individual and self-assessments of abilities and earlier performance (9). Finally, Psychology Dictionary Online characterizes self-confidence as the trust of an individual in their own abilities, capabilities, and decisions, or convictions that the person can face challenges and demands each day effectively (10). More happiness is also achieved without anyone else confidence. Typically, because of your achievements, you are happier when you are confident in your abilities. The more invigorated and motivated you are to take action and accomplish your goals when you rest easy thinking about your capabilities. Self-confidence, at that point, is comparable to self-efficacy in that it will in general concentrate on the future performance of the individual; yet it is by all accounts based on past performance, and so it also centers around the past one might say. While considering the convictions of an individual about their abilities regarding a particular task or set of tasks, many clinicians will in general allude to self-efficacy, while self-confidence is all the more often alluded to as a broader and more stable trait regarding the perceptions of an individual's overall ability.

In particular, anxiety is a human phenomenon and is considered to be a remarkable contribution to advanced as an adaptive mechanism for hazard replicating, and the two have been utilized synonymously, however the contrast among fear and anxiety is that the previous is wordy and the later chronic. With a variety of overtones and nuances of meaning from ordinary use, as well as from brain research, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, anxiety is an incredibly mind boggling concept. The word anxiety means a profoundly personal, phenomenally experienced feeling of anxiety and anguish. In attempting to explicate the meaning of anxiety within the context of psychological theory, Freud (1936) was especially concerned with identifying the sources of stressful stimulation that evoked anxiety reactions and with clarifying the efforts of anxiety on symptom formation and behaviour. Freud (1936) regarded anxiety as 'something felt', an unpleasant effect of state or condition. All that is secured by the term anxious apprehension or anxious expectation and various discharge phenomena are characterized by this state. He also emphasized the distinction among fear and anxiety. Freud proposed that target anxiety and hypochondriac anxiety exist. Objective anxiety is somewhat more complex than fear, incorporating a sense of helplessness objective anxiety results from some source of danger in the external environmental. Neurotic anxiety has no source in the external world. Like fear, neurotic anxiety is a complex internal reaction to some perceived danger. It prepares the individual to cope with the impending threat. However, it differs from fear in that it is based not on external danger but on the individual‘s own history of traumatic experiences such as birth, the loss of a loved one or punishment of socially disapproved urges. Anxiety is a salient and complex phenomenon in the field of language teaching. Test anxiety happens when an individual encounters a sentiment of apprehension and wariness during, previously, and after a certain examination as an aspect of anxiety (11). This basic human emotion can have both facilitating and weakening consequences for the learning cycle. As Brown (2007) mentions, while learners can profit by an average degree of anxiety, on the off chance that they are overpowered by this inclination, understudies ' performance will deteriorate. Individuals can take advantage of a moderate degree of anxiety to remain hard-working and accountable for what they have to do, and consequently have a more sustainable and prosperous life (12). This paper will concentrate exclusively on adverse anxiety, so test anxiety and adverse test anxiety are utilized interchangeably. Analysts imagine that the way individuals perform can be harmed by a lot of anxiety, as if test anxiety recollect what they have examined. Understudies whose overarousal impairs their ability to perform well are said to experience the ill effects of test anxiety in a certain testing situation. There is by all accounts a relationship between the degree of test anxiety experienced by the learners and the outcomes they get in a particular test. On the other hand, a few scholars accept there is close to nothing, assuming any, connection between test anxiety and the performance of the learners (13)

In spite of its wide and common current usage and ancient roots, general mental ability is relatively a recent concept of psychology. Almost every writer on the subject has put forward his own definition and some in the fullness of time have offered even more than one. It is true that some of the apparent disagreement is mainly verbal but many of them reflect fundamental differences of opinion concerning the concept of general mental ability. General mental ability is a concept rather than a power or a thing that can be observed. It causes difficulty when its definition is attempted and it leads to a great variety of interpretations. Psychologists have disagreed to enlist the essential factors of behaviour that can be labeled as 'intelligence'. Some have focused on adaptability to new circumstances, abstractness to unpredictability, and the utilization of images somewhat. To some insight, the whole or average of so many separate and assorted mental abilities appeared to speak to one central uniform characteristic, to other people. There are three sub-hypotheses in Sternberg's (1985) hypothesis of knowledge, one about context, one about experience and one about intellectual components of information handling. In a given culture or content, the contextual sub-hypothesis attempts to determine what might be considered keen. Culturally insightful behavior, according to Sternberg, incorporates adapting to one's present environment, choosing a more optimal environment or regarding one's present environment. The hypothesis asserts that the expression of any savvy behavior is a function of the experience one has with the testing of a particular class of tasks. Insight is best demonstrated when the task is relatively novel or unfamiliar, according to Sternberg. The psychological sub-hypothesis depicts intellectual structures and cycles that together generate insightful behavior. Three general sorts of cycles are proposed by Sternberg: a) meta components (which control and monitor handling); b) components of performance (measures that execute plans); c) components of information acquisition (which encode and assemble new information). Triarchical hypothesis all in all claims academic, practical). There are at least eight unmistakable insights logical, etymological, spatial, real, sensation, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalist-according to Gardener's (1999) hypothesis of numerous knowledge. He focused on that there may be more sorts of insight — eight is certainly not a magic number. He has as of late speculated that spiritual knowledge and existential insight, or the ability to address central issues about the meaning of life, may exist. He says that in one of these eight areas, individuals may dominate yet have no remarkable abilities in the other seven. Thus, if young men dominate in math and science, that doesn't mean that they are smarter than ladies. Gardener argues that the ability to tackle issues and create items or results that are valued by culture is knowledge. Two different ways of seeing knowledge are available. One recognizes liquid insight and knowledge that is crystallized. Liquid knowledge is reflected in the ability to reason, attention span, memory and critical thinking of individuals. It is what a person is brought into the world with. Crystallized insight is acquired through experience of learning, which improves the vocabulary and general information on a person. The second insight approach sees the human brain as a sophisticated PC that organizes and recovers information from stores. The smarter a person is, the more compelling these methods are. After examining the perspectives on certain therapists on the nature of insight, we can say that high IQ is an advantage in life because virtually all operations require some reasoning and decision-making, while low IQ is often a disadvantage (Arvey, 2004). In addition to this, because of contrasts in both their environment and hereditary heritage, individuals vary in knowledge (Duke, 2004). In fact, the separation of knowledge "in the qualities" from insight "because of involvement" is almost inconceivable. Qualities don't fix conduct. Rather, they build up a range of potential reactions to the variety of potential encounters that can be given by the environment. Insight is the ability to utilize memory, information , experience, understanding, reasoning, imagination, and judgment so as to tackle issues and adapt to new situations, Allwords Dictionary (2006 ) stated. Insight, accordingly, is seeing the perfect thing , at the perfect second, in the correct way. It is the general capacity to understand and meet with the situations successfully that life may present. An intelligent person has the ability to adjust himself with ease, efficiency and speed. He has the capacity to assimilate ideas very quickly and clearly.

seeks inspiration from the theory which presupposes that measures of difference in achievement and intelligence are not perfectly correlated. The history of psychological testing reveals that the theory regarding direct relationship between achievement and intelligence is very-very old. It was perhaps, Aristotle, Who first of all, nearly 23 centuries ago, professed- from the view of differences in functioning of intellectthat some people are fit for the jobs involving abstract thinking, whereas according to him, others are destined to be wood -cutters, hewers and watercarriers. Actually, the two notions- one stressing that individuals are different from the view of functioning of their intellect and the other claiming that such differences are hereditary and inborn- have influenced man's thinking in almost all the societies since the times immemorial. Keeping these two facts in view, it may be realized that the question regarding relationship between achievement and intelligence fulfills the criteria of both antiquity and jubiquity. Obviously, the empirical evidence embodied in the researches quoted by above mentioned researchers fails to answer, as to what is the exact degree of relationship between achievement and intelligence. Actually the question of the exact level of connection among achievement and insight was as unambiguous as it was at Aristotle 's time for the current investigation. Here a touch of concentration will reveal that the notion of the relationship among achievement and insight had already secured the theoretical, impressionistic and psychometric (or logical) stages before the current investigator aspired to take up research in this particular field. Although Brown (1940) has professed in an alternate context that each theoretical notion passes through three stages, namely magic, religion and science, before we are able to set up a scientifically solid explanation. The contention of the present investigator is that though the notion regarding relationship between achievement and intelligence seems to have covered all the three stages of development, the answer to the question as to what is the exact degree of relationship between the two variables was not available to the present investigator. If Kelley‘s theory is acceptable then indices of differences in academic attainment become indirect indicators of differences in intelligence. Some empirical examinations (Dhaliwal, 1971, 1974) have also demonstrated that as far as measurement blunders, the discrepancy among insight and achievement is explainable, contaminating both test situations, meaning that there is virtually no contrast between the two kinds of measurements. Hence, there exists perfect correlation between the two variables which of course, may be empirically reached only when perfectly valid and reliable tools would be used or measurement errors. Obviously, when Kelley and his followers contended that achievement and intelligence tests cover the same ground, then came to profess that presumption which regards one‘s score on intelligence test as a measure of one‘s capacity for performance and that based on achievement test as measure of performance. Is there another question as to if such a presumption is verifiable? In any case, in the current study, the actualizer is the one who surpasses the expectation of academic performance based on aptitude, the par-actualizer is the one who achieves the ideal degree of accomplishment and the non-actualizer is the one who doesn't proceed as well as would be normal from known characteristics or abilities , especially from intellectual aptitude measures. An individual may thusly be an actualizer, a par-actualizer, and a non-actualizer. English and English (1958) gave a connotation when they characterized achievement as preferred performance over anticipated from a measure of ability, specifically obtaining good grades in school or achieving better scores on the trial of school achievement, than anticipated from a general knowledge test or academic course.

In the population, individual contrasts in various mental ability tests that range in intricacy from basic reaction time to abstract reasoning are all emphatically correlated. The total covariance among all such tests can be analyzed into a number that, in terms of their generality, are hierarchical, with the most general factor, or g, at the apex. This g factor is common to all kinds of psychological performance, regardless of other ability factors ( for example verbal, spatial, numerical, musical, and so forth) that may be included, and is the crucial factor in the practical validity of most tests. The correlations with the heritability of various tests, inbreeding depression, heterosis, average evoked potential, brain metabolism, and many other physical correlates indicate that it is profoundly enmeshed with many organismic variables as a result of evolution. A theory based on empirical evidence links g to neural processes involved in the speed and efficiency of information processing (14).

Occasional anxiety in an individual can be regarded as normal. It is also normal for people to have elevated anxiety in high stakes situations such as taking university study examinations. Anxiety over tests has been reported to be relatively high in populations of university students (15, 16). However, very high levels of anxiety over study examinations could be debilitating and lead to poorer performance as well as intrusive worry. Meddling concern, in particular, is associated with mental confusion, stress, and physiological arousal when presented to an assessment situation. Academic self-confidence may ameliorate test anxiety among students. However, it is unclear as to the association between academic self-confidence and efficacy on the one hand and test anxiety indicators of performance impairment and intrusive worry on the other. This study aimed to address this knowledge gap with data from a Nigerian university setting. Factors that may influence test anxiety among students include year of study and gender. Past investigations by Akanbi (2013) and Rezazadeh and Tavakoli (200 ) found that there was no significant distinction in the degree of test anxiety based on the understudy study year. A number of studies reported female students with higher test anxiety than their male peers (17-20) reported no gender difference in test anxiety among students in Nigeria.

In order to have thorough understanding of the relationship of personality variables namely self confidence & anxiety with actualization and non actualization of general mental ability, there is a need to explore the subject further. Since, it is not feasible for an individual researcher to study all personality variables in a short span of time. As it is observed from the study that anxiety, self confidence is the true vital personality variables. Therefore, the investigator has made an attempt to explore the relationship of self confidence and anxiety with general mental ability. 1. Tryon G.S. The measurement and treatment of test anxiety. Rev. Educ. Res. 1980;50:343–372. doi: 10.3102/00346543050002343. 2. Wigfield A., Eccles J.S. Test anxiety in elementary and secondary school students. Educ. Psychol. 1989;24:159–183. doi: 10.1207/s15326985ep2402_3. 3. Begum, T.S. & Phukan, M. (2005). Correlation between academic achievement and intelligence. Indian Psychological Review, 65, special issue, 257- 259. 4. Kaur, B. (2004). Effect of Emotional quotent and intelligence quotient on achievement of 9th class students. Unpublished M.Ed. dissertation , Panjab University, Chandigarh. 5. Ahmad, N. & Raheem, A. (2003). Intelligence, SES and Adjustment as Correlates of Academic Achievement, The Educational Review, 46 (9), 166-169. 6. Babo, G.D. (2001). The impact of formal public school instrumental music instruction programme on an eighth grade middle school student‘s reading and mathematics achievement. Dissertation Abstracts International, 62(4), 1277. 7. Ellakka Kumar, B. & Elanka Thirselvan, N. (2000). Test anxiety of higher secondary students and their achievement in Physics. The Educational Review, 106(5&6), 11-14. 8. Bénabou, R., & Tirole, J. (2002). Self-confidence and personal motivation. The quarterly journal of economics, 117(3), 871-915. 9. Lenney, E. (1977). Women's self-confidence in achievement settings. Psychological bulletin, 84(1), 1. 10. Arch, E. (1987). Differential Responses of Females and Males to Evaluative Stress: Anxiety, Self-esteem, Efficacy and Willingness to Participate. Advances in test anxiety research, 97-106. 11. Arch, E. (1987). Differential Responses of Females and Males to Evaluative Stress: Anxiety, Self-esteem, Efficacy and Willingness to Participate. Advances in test anxiety research, 97-106. 12. Kahan, L. M., L, K. (2008). The Correlation of Test Anxiety and Academic Performance

13. Cheraghian, B., Fereidooni Moghadam, M., Baraz-Pardjani, SH., & Bavarsad, N., (2008). Test Anxiety and its Relationship with Academic Performance among Nursing Students. Journal of Knowledge, and Health, 3 (3-4), 25-29. 14. Jensen, A. R. (1991). General mental ability: From psychometrics to biology. Diagnostique, 16(2-3), 134-144. 15. Afolayan, J. A., Bitrus, D., Olayinka, O., Adeyanju, B. & Agama, J.A. (2013). Relationship between anxiety and academic performance of nursing students, Niger Delta University, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. Advances in Applied Science Research, 4(5):25-33. 16. Mehdinezhadi, V., & Bamari, Z. (2015). The relationship between test anxiety, epistemological beliefs and problem solving among students. New Approaches in Educational Research, 4(1), 2-8. 17. Oladipo, S. E., & Ogungbamila, A. (2013). Demographic predictors of test anxiety among undergraduates. International Journal Learning and Development, 3(1), 62–66. https://doi.org/10.5296/ijld.v3i1.3133 18. Rezazadeh, M., & Tavakoli, M. (2009). Investigating the relationship among test anxiety, gender, academic achievement and years of study: A case of Iranian EFL university students. English Language Teaching, 2(4), 68–74. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v2n4p68 19. Akanbi, S. T. (2013). Comparisons of Test Anxiety Level of Senior Secondary School Students across Gender, Year of Study, School Type and Parental Educational Background. Ife PsycholoGIA, 21(1), 20. Rezazadeh, M., & Tavakoli, M. (2009). Investigating the relationship among test anxiety, gender, academic achievement and years of study: A case of Iranian EFL university students. English Language Teaching, 2(4), 68–74. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v2n4p68

Research Scholar, Faculty of Education, CMJ University, Jorabat, Meghalaya