SAMPLE: Thirty-one senior nursing students participated in the study. They were all Caucasian females. A convenience sample of graduating senior nursing students taking a nursing leadership course was surveyed.

INSTRUMENTS: The students answered four questionnaires, a set of psychological testing materials consisting of Profile of Mood States (POMS) to measure emotional state Fundamental Inventory of Cognition (FIC) to measure cognitive functioning Multi-Modal Memory Questionnaire (MMQ) to measure cognitive functioning ISU Stress/Memory Questionnaire (ISUQ) to get information on characteristics of the student nurse's life

ANALYSIS: The analysis involved the computation of 5249 correlations. This figure is derived by multiplying the number of questions of each scale with the number of questions of the other scales. Because there were many correlations, it was necessary to adopt a conservative level of significance for each correlation so that the findings overall were not likely to indicate significance by chance. If 100 correlations are computed at the .05 level of significance, five of the correlations will appear significant erroneously. With 5249 correlations overall, over 300 correlations can be expected to be significant by chance at the .05 level. When we set the significance level at .01 for 5249 correlations, about 60 could be found significant erroneously.

RESULTS: The POMS was substantially correlated with several difficulties with cognition.

CONCLUSIONS: The results show that decrements in cognitive performance are paralleled by decrements in physiological and emotional states. Thus, a person's physical state, attitude, social interactions, expertise, and culture influence what is learned, retained, remembered, and analyzed.