ISSN 2411-958X (Print) ISSN 2411-4138 (Online) European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies May-August 2017 Volume 3, Issue 3 22 Anxiety with and Without New Technology Among Romanian High School Students Elena Cocoradă Cătălin Ioan Maican Transilvania University of Braşov, Romania Abstract Nowadays, the new technology defines the classroom and students’ and teachers’ life. Sometimes the attitude towards technology use is marked by negative dysfunctional emotion, anxiety, fear, avoidance or dependence. This paper focuses both on the anxiety with the new technology and on the anxiety without technology. Our research aims to examine the attitudes and behaviours of Romanian high school students regarding trendy technologies, such as computers, internet and smartphones, including the access to social networking applications. The following tools were used: CARS (Heinssen, Glass, & Knight, 1987), IAS (Nickel and Pinto, 1986), four scales from MTUAS (Rosen, Whaling, Carrier, Cheever, and Rokkum, 2013), the Use of Smartphones for Learning Purposes Scale-USLS and a socio-demographic questionnaire. There were 517 participants distributed in two studies. The findings showed some differences concerning gender, age, specialization and academic performance, as well as an evolution of participants from the anxiety towards the computer (highest with females) to the anxiety without technology (similar for females and males). School performance is negatively associated with computer anxiety and Facebook activities. The study is important in the Romanian context, where computers, internet and smartphone penetration is more pronounced with younger people. Pedagogical issues of the research are also discussed, anxiety having a double function, as an endogenous and exogenous factor with respect to one’s academic and professional development. Keywords: anxiety, computer, internet, smartphone, high school students. Introduction Forms of academic anxiety Nowadays, the new technology defines the classroom and the lives of students and teachers. The acceptance of the new technology concept in the learning area focuses especially on communication technology, like computers, tablets, internet and smartphones. The attitudes concerning these devices are variable, depending on gender, age, cultural context or the decade research (King et al., 2014; Powell, 2013). As a consequence of technical and social developments, the research studies first put emphasis on the anxiety towards computers and the internet. This is a specific anxiety, associated with a specific situation, revealed in negative emotional reactions towards using computers, negative expectations concerning equipment damage, fatal consequences of the errors in use, or stress and frustration (Oetting, 1983; Phelps & Ellis, 2009). The anxiety towards computers and the internet is similar to math anxiety, or to the anxiety towards foreign languages and all the specific anxieties developed during school, which are cumulated under the umbrella-concept of academic anxiety (Cassady, 2010; Cazan, Cocorada, Maican, 2016). This specific anxiety is positively associated with the general trait of anxiety (Thatcher & Perrewé, 2002). Over the recent years, research studies have emphasised the anxiety without technology. Called nomophobia or dependence on technology, it focuses on new behavioural addictions, including smartphone addiction (Dixit et al., 2010; Sapacz, Rockman, & Clark, 2016). The anxiety without technology is a situational anxiety, experienced as fear of not being able to use a smartphone or the internet, being beyond mobile phone contact, not being able to access information, or losing the connectedness and the services it offers (King et al., 2014). Both forms, the anxiety towards the computer or the internet, and the anxiety without technology, are the extremes of the continuum.