Aromatherapy with inhalation effectively alleviates the test anxiety of college students: A meta-analysis

作者：Jiage Luan, Mengshu Yang, Yan Zhao, Yu Zang, Ziyu Zhang, Haiying Chen · 发表于：Frontiers in Psychology · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1042553 · 被引用次数：18 · 研究领域：Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies、Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes、Music Therapy and Health

Objective Test anxiety is one of the common psychological and behavioral problems of college students, which can result in poor academic performance and even academic failure. Aromatherapy has been proposed as a promising method to reduce test anxiety in college students, but its precise efficacy has not been fully confirmed. This meta-analysis evaluated the effects of aromatherapy on the symptoms of test anxiety in college students to serve as a reference for future research and provide more scientific and exact evidence. Methods PubMed, The Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Embase, CINAHL, Science Direct, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Science and Technology Journal Full-Text Database (VIP), and Wanfang Data were electronically searched from inception to June 2022 to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on aromatherapy for treating students’ test anxiety. The Cochrane Risk of Bias Assessment Tool for RCTs was used by two reviewers to critically and independently assess the methodological quality of the included studies. Review Manager 5.4 was used for the meta-analysis. Stata 17.0 was used for sensitivity analysis and Egger’s test. Results Seven RCTs included 425 patients, with a moderate risk of bias in the included studies. The meta-analysis found that aromatherapy effectively reduced test anxiety in college students (SMD = −0.67, p < 0.01), with high heterogeneity of results ( I 2 = 72%). The different types of essential oil devi...