Operational Meetings on Informational Anxiety and Normosis at the Laboratory of Practices in Psychology and Information Science (LAPCI)

Abstract

Understood as an emotional state of apprehension, tension and restlessness experienced by individuals when faced with an excess of information, informational anxiety is a human feeling that permeates and interferes with the process of searching, retrieving and appropriating content from information sources and systems. Informational anxiety presents a concept closely associated with informational normosis, which agrees with the sociocultural phenomenon of acceptance and normalization of too much information, and contributes to dysfunctional behavioral models, such as the constant search for knowledge and the “need” for permanent updating. At the university level, we observed that research activities, publications, fulfilling the credits of curricular components and financial vulnerability interfere, mainly, in the performance of undergraduate and graduate university students. Thus, the present research aimed to discuss how anxiety and informational normosis infer in the behavior of undergraduate and graduate students at the Federal University of Bahia and Salvador University. The investigation is part of the extension project structured by the research group at the Laboratory of Practices in Psychology and Information Science (LAPCI), called Operative Meetings of University Practices: Informational Anxiety and Normosis in Undergraduate and Graduate Studies. In order to fulfill the objective in question, we outlined the methodological procedures, based on the monographic procedure method (multiple case study), descriptive research level, technique and instrument for collecting data and information, such as the critical incident and the electronic questionnaire, respectively. As partial results, the analyzed students from higher education institutions presented a mild to moderate degree of anxiety, related to the excessive volume of information, with underlying difficulties in the attempt to seek and retrieve qualified content. The partial final considerations showed that disseminating accurate information, always oriented to the informational needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students, provide a possibility to mitigate feelings and emotions that cause anxiety in the investigated university students.