title: Nursing students' anxiety and clinical performance.
abstract: This study examined how mood states affect nursing students' performance on a treatment procedure consisting of a novel combination of familiar clinical steps. Thirty third-year and fourth-year nursing students were first taught the procedure and then given both an anxious-mood and a calm-mood induction in a randomly assigned counterbalanced order. Anxiety was induced by showing a video of interviews with frontline nurses and doctors during the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in Hong Kong, China; calmness was induced by a video of a nursing student's pleasant orientation to a clinical placement site. Nursing students were significantly less proficient in performing the newly acquired procedure after an anxious-mood induction (focused on occupational risks) than after a calm-mood induction. Therefore, managing clinical training site anxiety among nursing students may help to optimize learning and clinical performance.
authors.affiliation: Po Leung Kuk Schools, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Ryan Yat-Ming
authors.initials: RY
authors.lastname: Cheung
authors.forename: Terry Kit-Fong
authors.initials: TK
authors.lastname: Au
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D002983:Clinical Competence; D005260:Female; D006723:Hong Kong; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009736:Nursing Process; D013338:Students, Nursing / Q000523:psychology*; D014743:Videotape Recording