Abstract
The current work investigates the influence of acute stress on mind wandering. Participants completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule as a measure of baseline negative mood, and were randomly assigned to either the high-stress or low-stress version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Participants then completed the Sustained Attention to Response Task as a measure of mind-wandering behavior. In Experiment 1, participants reporting a high degree of negative mood that were exposed to the high-stress condition were more likely to engage in a variable response time, make more errors, and were more likely to report thinking about the stressor relative to participants that report a low level of negative mood. These effects diminished throughout task performance, suggesting that acute stress induces a temporary mind-wandering state in participants with a negative mood. The temporary affect-dependent deficits observed in Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2, with the high negative mood participants demonstrating limited resource availability (indicated by pupil diameter) immediately following stress induction. These experiments provide novel evidence to suggest that acute psychosocial stress briefly suppresses the availability of cognitive resources and promotes an internally oriented focus of attention in participants with a negative mood.
Highlights
The present findings are compatible with such an account, with acute stress inducing a temporary stressororiented bias in attentional allocation relative to the low stress group, with performance deficits potentiated by the degree of negative mood reported prior to stress induction
When exposed to our high-stress manipulation, participants in the high negative mood group displayed more variable response behavior and made more errors compared to participants with low negative mood, and showed relatively stable versus decreasing patterns of self-report mind wandering compared to other participants over time
With the current work representing the first investigation of stress effects on mindwandering behavior, Experiment 1 was exploratory in nature with the minimal prediction that negative mood would potentiate the effects of stress
Summary
Transactional models of stress (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984) are multidimensional representations that emphasize the reciprocal relation between state and stressor on behavior. Transactional models provide an algorithm that characterizes stress response based on an individual’s appraisal of environmental demands and subsequent choice of coping strategy (Lazarus, 1966, 1999; Stokes and Kite, 1994, 2000; Zeidner and Endler, 1996; Hammond, 2000). Appraisal mechanisms evaluate the degree of personal relevance within the stressful context, while coping mechanisms regulate whether the individual engages in either a task-focused or emotion-focused strategy (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). An emotion-focused coping strategy is intimately tied to selfregulation and self-referential mentation, and facilitates the prioritization of processing internal worries at the expense of concurrent task performance (e.g., Matthews and Desmond, 2002)
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