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.
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