ADOLESCENT Irish girls have higher anxiety levels in test or examination situations than boys or girls of a similar age in other countries, a new international survey shows.

The results of the survey - presented at last month's International Congress of Psychology in Montreal, Canada - will be of value to students in exam situations, as well as their parents and teachers, especially guidance counsellors.

And the results could lead to further studies which would indicate future vocational success or failure and their correlation with health problems in later life, according to one of the researchers, Ann Whelan, president of the Association of Remedial Teachers in Ireland, who co-presented the finding of the survey at the Montreal conference.

She undertook the work, pioneered by Professor Charles Spielberger of the University of South Florida, with Dr Yosi Toubiana of the University of Tel Aviv. They used Test Attitude Inventory and Pictorial Evaluation of Test Reactions measures in this survey, which was carried out during 1996 with 1,702 Argentinian, Canadian, Irish, Israeli, Israeli Arabs, Czech Turkish and American students.

Over 56 per cent of Irish girls showed a level of anxiety in a test situation, compared with around SO per cent of American girls and just under 50 per cent of the Turkish girls surveyed. Irish boys, on the other hand, reported the lowest anxiety level of any girls or boys surveyed - 46.41 per cent - while almost 50 per cent of American boys and 51.5 per cent of Czech boys reported anxiety in a test situation.

According to Whelan, the high level of anxiety reported by Irish girls could be positive and could account for their better results in the Leaving Cert examination. And the boys' lower level of anxiety could indicate that they are too laid-back and could explain for their poorer exam performance.

"Irish girls scored high on text anxiety levels, but such anxiety may have a motivating effect. The number of girls who sat the Leaving Cert in 1995 was 31,970, with 28,402 achieving five or more passes, while of 30,043 boys taking the same examination, 25,369 had five passes or more," she points out.

"It was possible in this survey to analyse results to pinpoint four different types of reaction to test anxiety," she reports. "These were `stressed', `worried', `coping' and `relaxed'. Our Irish students scored low on coping. Twenty per cent of all students cross-culturally experienced anxiety in regard to time aspects of tests - that is, in completing essay-style questions in the allotted time."

Self-report questionnaires were used in the survey, providing a. direct measure of each individual's own perceptions of his or her emotions. But she cautions: "It has been found consistently that males report lower levels than those reported by females for most specific fears. High masculinity is significantly correlated with low levels of self-reported fears, which may show conformity to traditional sex roles, where females are allowed to" be fearful while males are not.

"Girls have also been found to show a greater willingness to report physical symptoms to such fears."

And her personal view of another reason for the higher anxiety level in Irish girls is that it could be attributed to the fact that our society in a transitional stage from being very traditional to becoming a mainstream Westernised society. However, she believes this aspect requires more study.

Anxiety may have positive or negative consequences," Whelan explains. "Positive affect is characterised by concentration, eagerness and enjoyment, while negative affect is reflected by anger, contempt, guilt, fear and nervousness.

"One person may be very concerned about an upcoming test to the extent that he or she is in a state of near panic, while another student might view such concern as necessary, since it indicates the importance of the event and is an alerting signal to invest effort in it, thus constituting a motivated facilitative affect.

IN A PREVIOUS study of performance anxiety in athletes, it was found that both Olympic winners and losers experienced similar amounts of anxiety. Less successful athletes paid attention to fears by panicking, while the winning athletes ignored their anxieties, concentrating on what they had to do, treating the anxiety as a nuisance and getting on with the job.

"On the other hand, people may deny choice in order to avoid anxiety. They may even deny their own potential to counteract anxiety. Students may try to actualise an image of what school and parents say they ought to be. They become anxious if they sense that they may not fit these images and then deny to themselves knowledge of their true wants and, goals in order to fit these images.

Education authorities in Britain, she says, offer examination-anxiety counselling sessions to students who are about to take important tests. "Those students who tend, to panic are shown how to relax, using cognitive methods. Other aspects of coping skills include encouraging students to time themselves in essay writing before the tests, using small or `mini' tests leading to a major one, positive statements emphasising strengths of a student and noting positive traits that the student exhibits in other areas of endeavour.

"Chronic worriers could be encouraged to relax while the overly-laid-back might be motivated."