Being a grump only makes things worse: a transactional account of acute stress on mind wandering

Is your neurologist taking this into account when designing your 100% recovery protocol? Having a stroke is extremely stressful, does your doctor realize that obvious fact?
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00730/full?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Psychology-w49-2013
Melaina T. Vinski^* and Scott Watter

• Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

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.

Introduction

The experience of stress is pervasive. In 2011, 23.6% of adult Canadians reported experiencing extreme stress in daily life (Statistics Canada, 2011). With chronic stress linked to immunological (e.g., Herbert and Cohen, 1993; Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 1996; Cohen et al., 2001; Esch et al., 2002a; Segerstrom and Miller, 2004, for reviews), cardiovascular (e.g., Harlan, 1981; Esch et al., 2002b; Bunker et al., 2003), and neurodegenerative disease (e.g., Gilad et al., 1990; Gilad and Gilad, 1995), as well as poor mental health (e.g., Negrão et al., 2000; Vaidya, 2000; Raison and Miller, 2003), an abundance of research has emerged with the aim of mapping both the psychological and physiological determinants of the body’s response to stress.

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