The dark side of perceived positive regard: When parents’ well-intended motivation strategies increase students’ test anxiety

Parental academic conditional positive regard (PACPR) is a socializing strategy in which parents provide more affection, esteem, and attention than usual when their child studies hard and achieves in school. It is favored and recommended as a positive parenting strategy, whereas empirical findings increasingly document serious psychological costs of this well-intended strategy. PACPR can be conceptualized as an important antecedent of test anxiety. However, no study has tested this assumption yet, and research on antecedents of test anxiety is generally scarce. Based on assumptions from self-determination and control-value theory, we conducted one study with secondary students (trait test anxiety, N = 653, M = 13 years) and one study with university students (state test anxiety and test performance, N = 166, M = 20 years), to examine distal (i.e., perceived PACPR) and proximal antecedents (i.e., contingent self-esteem as value cognition; ability self-concept as control cognition) of students’ test anxiety. In line with our hypotheses, path analyses revealed a positive relation between perceived PACPR and test anxiety, and that contingent self-esteem mediated this relation. Ability self-concept showed inverse relations with test anxiety, which, in turn, predicted poorer test performance in Study 2. Unexpectedly, we found no interactive effect of contingent self-esteem and ability self-concept. Our results extend prior research on psychological costs of PACPR to the field of achievement emotions, and suggest that the detrimental effects of perceived PACPR on test anxiety can be generalized onto students with high and low ability self-concept, respectively. Possible reasons of our findings, and practical implications, are discussed.