Previous studies of the effects of failure upon WAIS subtest performance have yielded discrepant findings for the Digit Span subtest and have failed to support clinical hypotheses regarding the Object Assembly and Arithmetic subtests. In the present study, 15 female college students were provided with a failure experience and showed significantly poorer performance than a control group of 15 on the Digit Span and Object Assembly subtests but not on Arithmetic. The implications of the present data for future research are discussed and possible explanations for the discrepancies in the literature are presented.
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