Relationship between Fear of Negative Evaluation and Anxiety

Anxiety is an important psychological phenomenon which influences everyone’s life. In other words everyone experience some sort of anxiety in a day to day life. Many people experience anxiety when they speak in front of public. For most people especially, students these feelings of anxiety start before they begin to speak and continue throughout the speech but subside immediately after the speech ends. Some may feel only slightly nervous whereas another may feel faded and nauseated. Like anxiety, fear of negative evaluation also one of an important psychological factors which negatively influences performance of students. With this background, the present study attempted to understand the relationship between these psychological factors of students deeply. A study was done at VIT University-Chennai among 64 students studying in different branches of engineering. Samples of the study are both hostel dwellers and day scholars. Of the 64 students, 33 were female and 31 were male, who were selected through simple random sampling method and survey research design was adopted. The tools used in this study are Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE; Watson & Friend, 1969) and State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; Speilberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg& Jacobs, 1983). The results showed that there is a significant positive relationship between anxiety and fear of negative evaluation. In other words the fear of negativism and State Trait Anxiety correlated highly positively.