Abstract:

Experiencing anxiety during adolescence can greatly reduce the quality of interpersonal relations and affect success in school, and life satisfaction as a whole. The social developmental situation in adolescence, characterized by dynamic changes both in terms of growth and the impact of external influences, can exaggerate the personal meaning of many factors and make them a potential source of anxiety. The research tasks associated with anxiety in adolescence bear the specific characteristics of our time. They are related to the fact that modern adolescents spend a long time at school and in the virtual environment. Traditionally, the school environment is to be the main source of emotional experiences during adolescence. But the mass distribution of the Internet has turned the virtual environment into a source of emotional experiences as well.

The accumulation of research experience related to the influences of the virtual and school environment on the emotional experiences and in particular on the anxiety symptoms manifested during the adolescence period is a necessary and useful practice for the contemporary educational environment. This experience enriches the knowledge about socializing factors influencing adolescents of the 21st century.

Empirical research:
The main focus of this research is to analyze the effects of school and virtual environment on manifested anxiety in adolescence.
The research was conducted with 339 teenagers from Bulgaria between 14 and 17 years of age in the eighth and ninth grade from both comprehensive and vocational schools.

Research methods:
1. The "Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale", (RCMAS) created by Reynolds and Richmond, is applied to measure the personal anxiety in a real environment.
2. The author modified, adapted and used a measurement version of a scale called ‘Version B’ or ‘Anxiety in the Internet’ in order to measure students’ personal anxiety in virtual environment.

Main results and conclusions:
There are no significant differences in manifest anxiety between different age groups and that proves the relative stability of the manifest anxiety during adolescence.

During adolescence, the school environment provokes more alarming anxiety symptoms in girls.

Girls experience extremely manifest anxiety symptoms associated with specific physiological reactions such as stomach-aches, sleeping difficulties, fatigue, breathing problems, sweating of the palms, nightmares, expected negative assessment by others.

In adolescence, personal anxiety manifests itself in varying intensity in real and virtual environments.

The virtual environment is a lesser source of worrying experiences than the real environment.

There is a very low positive correlation between the anxiety manifested in real environment and in virtual environment. The data shows that when the people had to self-assess themselves on both scales - RCMAS and ‘Version B’: ‘Anxiety in the Internet’, they very clearly distinguished unpleasant anxiety experiences according to the environment that provoked them.

Keywords:

Educational environment, virtual environment, anxiety, adolescence.