Reward Influence on the Heart: Cardiovascular Response as a Function of Incentive Value at Five Levels of Task Demand

This study examined cardiovascular effects of incentive value in men and women confronted with cognitive challenges that were more and less difficult to meet. Participants performed computer memory tasks varying in difficulty from low to high, with instructions that they could earn chances toward a $100 prize or $10 prize by attaining a 90% success rate. Analysis of cardiovascular responses assessed during work revealed an interaction between difficulty and incentive value for heart rate. Participants' heart rate responses were proportional to task difficulty and unaffected by incentive value in all conditions except for the most difficult one. Where difficulty was greatest, $100 participants showed relatively high heart rate responsiveness, whereas $10 participants showed low heart rate responsiveness. This heart rate finding corroborates and extends cardiovascular results from previous experiments, and lends further support to the view that cardiovascular responses will be proportional to incentive value only under some task conditions.     

Mental fatigue influence on effort-related cardiovascular response: difficulty effects and extension across cognitive performance domains

Two experiments investigated cardiovascular effects of mental fatigue as a function of (1) the difficulty of the cognitive challenge with which participants were confronted, and (2) the relevance of that challenge to the activity that instigated the fatigue. In the first, participants performed an easy (fatigue low) or difficult (fatigue high) counting task and then were presented an arithmetic challenge (task B relevance high) or a scanning challenge (task B relevance low) with instructions that they would avoid a noise if they attained a modest performance standard. Analysis of blood pressure responses assessed during the work periods revealed fatigue main effects, reflecting stronger responses for High Fatigue participants, regardless of the character of the second task. In the second, the procedure was the same except that it included a high performance standard and provided the chance to win a prize. Analysis of the pressure data revealed fatigue x work period interactions, reflecting relatively stronger responses among High Fatigue participants in work period 1, but relatively weaker responses among these participants in work period 2. Results confirm previous findings and support an analysis of fatigue influence on effort and associated cardiovascular responses. They also argue against the idea that mental fatigue influence may be confined to relevant cognitive performance realms.

Self-Relevance of Performance, Task Difficulty, and Task Engagement Assessed as Cardiovascular Response

Two experiments examined task engagement, quantified as cardiovascular (CV) response, under conditions of high self-relevance of performance (i. e., when performance had strong implications for the individual's self-definition and self-esteem). Experiment 1 involved a 2 (self-relevance) × 2 (task difficulty) design and revealed, in accordance with predictions derived from Brehm's energization model, that self-relevance per se does not result in high engagement, but that high self-relevance bound up with high task difficulty does. Experiment 2 involved three difficulty conditions (very easy, moderate, very difficult) under highly self-relevant performance conditions and revealed a curvilinear difficulty/engagement relationship. In both studies CV responses were independent of feeling states.     

Task difficulty, cardiovascular response, and the magnitude of goal valence

Sixty-four young women expected to perform an easy, moderately difficult, or extremely difficult memory task with the opportunity to earn a small incentive for good performance. Cardiovascular (heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure) and subjective measures were taken immediately prior to task performance. Both systolic blood pressure (SBP) responses and ratings of goal attractiveness were nonmonotonically related to expected task difficulty, with the most pronounced SBP elevations and highest goal attractiveness in the moderately difficult task condition. Product-moment correlations among cardiovascular response measures revealed a strong positive association between systolic and diastolic pressure (but not heart rate) change in the easy condition, positive relationships among all measures in the moderately difficult condition, and no significant correlations in the extremely difficult condition. Subjective measures of arousal were not affected by the task difficulty manipulation. Principal findings are discussed in terms of a theoretical model proposed by Brehm (1979) that states that motivation varies as a nonmonotonic function of the difficulty of goal attainment. Intercorrelations among cardiovascular response variables are considered in terms of their possible indication of the mechanisms underlying blood pressure changes associated with variations in motivation.     

Physiological and psychological responses to exercise with an induced attentional focus

In this study techniques were employed to induce exercising subjects to focus attention on themselves or on an external event. A total of 20 adult subjects (10 men and 10 women) were familiarized with a treadmill exercise protocol and then on two subsequent occasions performed submaximal exercise followed by a run to exhaustion under attentional conditions of self-focus (watching themselves in a mirror while listening to their breathing) and external focus (watching and listening to a movie). The order of focus conditions was counterbalanced among subjects. Analysis of postexperimental responses from subjects indicated that the procedures used to induce each type of attentional focus were successful. However, physiological and psychological responses in the two focus conditions were not always uniform for men and women, particularly during light work when men tended to have higher heart rates and significantly lower Rated Perceived Exertion while women had lower heart rates and higher Rated Perceived Exertion under self-focused conditions than under externally focused conditions. Possible explanations for the incongruence of physiological and psychological responses of men and women to the two types of attentional focus are discussed.     

Success and Failure, Gender Differences, and the Menstrual Cycle

Eighty-one women and 26 men were led to succeed or fail at a task. No differences in actual performance were found between men and women or among women in different menstrual phases. Although they had participated alone, women felt worse, less competent, and less "up" than men after both success and failure. After success women also felt less satisfied, felt they had made lower scores, expected to perform worse, and rewarded themselves less than men. After success, women who were menstruating at the time of the experiment reported feeling better than women in other menstrual phases on most measures. A possible explanation was that menstruating women may have expected to perform poorly.     

Multiple resources and brain laterality

Two studies tested the multiple resources model of information processing using tachistoscopically lateralized input. In Exp. 1 37 normal, dextral subjects, 18 men aged 18/21 yr. and 19 women aged 18/22 yr. responded manually to a visuo-spatial and verbal dual-task presented simultaneously to left and right brain or nonlaterally. Both men and women tended to have superior performance with coherent lateral input, however, differences in task difficulty and the possibility of a left-to-right scanning advantage with lateral input made interpretation of the data tenuous. In Exp. 2 the difficulty of the two tasks was more equal and a third viewing condition, having noncoherent lateral input, was included. Normal, dextral subjects, 10 men aged 18/21 yr. and 10 women aged 19/21 yr. were tested under all three viewing conditions. Both men and women had superior performance with coherent lateral input compared to the other two conditions. The results led to speculations that each hemisphere has unique pools of resources, that the resources of one or both hemispheres may be functional in processing a given task, and that in dual-task situations the brain operates most efficiently and accurately with direct access of appropriate tasks to each hemisphere.     

Detection of feigned memory impairments using a Chinese word task

In this study the detection of feigned memory impairments was investigated using a forced-choice task with Chinese words as stimuli. Task difficulty on accuracy and response time and the faking strategies employed were examined for 85 participants, 42 men and 43 women, who were administered the experimental task. Following a simulation design, all participants performed under control and faking conditions. Their accuracy of performance and response times were measured. Analysis indicated significant differences on both outcome measures for the two conditions. Further, a significant difference in accuracy, but not in response time, among levels of task difficulty was observed. For classification accuracy, using the cut-off score criterion seemed more effective than using the below-chance criterion or response time. Implications for relying on chance criterion to identify deception are discussed.     

Gender Differences in Biobehavioral Aftereffects of Stress on Eating,Frustration, and Cardiovascular Responses1

Eating, persistence, and cardiovascular responses were evaluated after exposure to a 25‐min noise stressor with or without perceived control. Participants were healthy men (n = 29) and women (n = 34), aged 21 to 45 years. There were no group differences in cognitive task performance or blood pressure during the stressor. However, perceived control resulted in lower mean blood pressure and heart rate after cessation of the stressor for men and women. Women without perceived control displayed greater frustration levels following the stressor, and frustrated women ate more bland food than did nonfrustrated women. Perceived control and frustration did not affect food consumption among men following the stressor. These findings indicate that there are health‐relevant gender differences in biobehavioral responses that occur in the aftermath of stressor exposure. In addition, perceived control was especially important for women to attenuate the behavioral and biological effects of stressor exposure.     

Learning under stress impairs memory formation

Converging lines of evidence indicate that stress either before or after learning influences memory. Surprisingly little is known about how memory is affected when people learn while they are stressed. Here, we examined the impact of learning under stress in 48 healthy young men and women. Participants were exposed to stress (socially evaluated cold pressor test) or a control condition while they learned emotional words and neutral words that were either conceptually associated with or unrelated to the stressor. Memory was assessed in free recall and recognition tests 24 h after learning. Learning under stress reduced both free recall and recognition performance, irrespective of the emotionality and the stress context relatedness of the words. While the effect of stress was comparable in men and women, women outperformed men in the free recall test. These findings show a memory impairing effect of learning under stress in humans and challenge some assumptions of current theories about the impact of stress around the time of learning on memory formation.     

Expertise and peripheral autonomic activity during the preparation phase in shooting events

This study compared effectiveness of the concentration period in two groups of shooters to evaluate the influence of their expertise while concentrating on the target. Marksmen (pistol shooters, 10 men and 5 women) and pentathletes (6 men and 7 women) took part in a shooting competition in keeping with the rules of each event. Participants were then asked to imagine themselves shooting, at the laboratory. Five variables representing the activity of the autonomic nervous system were continuously recorded (skin resistance and potential, skin blood flow, skin temperature, instantaneous heart rate). Autonomic responses recorded during concentration, actual shooting, and mental imagery were compared by calculating the ratios concentration/ shooting and imagery/shooting. The resultant mean ratio was used to characterize each participant. The same autonomic nervous system pattern was observed during concentrating on the target, mental imagery, and actual shooting. However, marksmen showed ratios closer to 1.0 than pentathletes, absolute mean differences being .06 and .3, respectively. Shorter duration and weakest amplitude responses were recorded during the concentration phase in the Pentathlete group, suggesting that they have more difficulty in using mental imagery during competition than marksmen. When subjects performed well, a specific response pattern was observed in the Marksman group, but not in the Pentathlete group, except in skin potential. In both Marksman and Pentathlete groups, a majority of negative skin potential responses were found in the concentration and shooting phases for the best shots.     

Sex differences in the time course of emotion

Conventional wisdom holds that women are more "emotional" than men. However, research evidence suggests that sex differences in emotion are considerably more complex. The authors tested hypotheses about sex differences in the engagement of the approach and avoidance motivational systems thought to underpin emotional responses. The authors measured reported emotional experience and startle response magnitude both during the presentation and after the offset of emotional stimuli that engage these motivational systems to assess whether men and women differ in their patterns of immediate response to emotional stimuli and in their patterns of recovery from these responses. Our findings indicated that women were more experientially reactive to negative, but not positive, emotional pictures compared to men, and that women scored higher than men on measure of aversive motivational system sensitivity. Although both men and women exhibited potentiation of the startle response during the presentation of negative pictures relative to neutral pictures, only women continued to show this relative potentiation during the recovery period, indicating that women were continuing to engage the aversive motivational system after the offset of negative emotional pictures.     

Sex differences in the response to emotional distraction: an event-related fMRI investigation

Evidence has suggested that women have greater emotional reactivity than men. However, it is unclear whether these differences in basic emotional responses are also associated with differences in emotional distractibility, and what the neural mechanisms that implement differences in emotional distractibility between women and men are. Functional MRI recording was used in conjunction with a working memory (WM) task, with emotional distraction (angry faces) presented during the interval between the memoranda and the probes. First, we found an increased impact of emotional distraction among women in trials associated with high-confidence responses, in the context of overall similar WM performance in women and men. Second, women showed increased sensitivity to emotional distraction in brain areas associated with “hot” emotional processing, whereas men showed increased sensitivity in areas associated with “cold” executive processing, in the context of overall similar patterns of response to emotional distraction in women and men. Third, a sex-related dorsal–ventral hemispheric dissociation emerged in the lateral PFC related to coping with emotional distraction, with women showing a positive correlation with WM performance in left ventral PFC, and men showing similar effects in the right dorsal PFC. In addition to extending to men results that have previously been reported in women, by showing that both sexes engage mechanisms that are similar overall in response to emotional distraction, the present study identifies sex differences in both the response to and coping with emotional distraction. These results have implications for understanding sex differences in the susceptibility to affective disorders, in which basic emotional responses, emotional distractibility, and coping abilities are altered.     

Gender, Appraisal, and Coping: A Longitudinal Analysis

ABSTRACT For 21 consecutive days, 186 male and female college students recalled the most stressful event of the day, recorded how the event was appraised, and indicated the coping methods they employed as well as their perceived effectiveness and the sequence in which they were used. Gender differences in seven coping strategies were examined in terms of frequency of use, extent of use, relative use, and the frequency with which each method was used first in the coping sequence. The gender differences that emerged were consistent with a socialization hypothesis that predicts more problem-focused coping in men and more use of support seeking and emotion-focused coping in women. Both men and women rated problem-focused coping responses as more generally effective than seeking social support, and the latter as more effective than emotion-focused coping responses. Additionally, we explored the roles of stressor type and of threat, challenge, and control appraisals in the observed gender differences.     

Same‐sex infidelity in heterosexual romantic relationships: Investigating emotional,relational, and communicative responses

The present study explores emotional, relational, and communicative responses to different‐sex and same‐sex infidelity in heterosexual romantic relationships. Two‐hundred and eighty‐five men and women completed an online survey. Individuals were asked to read a scenario in which an imagined heterosexual partner engages in infidelity with a different‐sex or same‐sex person. Individuals were randomly assigned to one of these two conditions and then asked to complete several measures assessing their imagined emotions, communicative responses, and relational outcomes. Results revealed that both men and women experienced more negative emotional responses to different‐sex infidelity versus same‐sex infidelity. Additionally, men reported more sexual arousal in response to a woman's same‐sex infidelity versus different‐sex infidelity, while women's sexual arousal did not vary across conditions. Lastly, men's communicative responses to jealousy (CRJs) for same‐sex and different‐sex infidelity did not vary, though women reported that they were more likely to respond to same‐sex infidelity than different‐sex infidelity with denial, and more likely to respond to different‐sex than same‐sex infidelity with signs of possession. Several emotional responses to same‐sex infidelity were also found to predict various CRJs. These findings and the implications of the study are discussed.     

Creativity in Men and Women: Threat,Other-Interest,and Self-Assessment

Previous research into gender and creativity has provided little evidence for consistent differences between men and women in creative performance. This research revisits this topic by proposing a person × situation approach, arguing that gender differences in creative performance only occur in certain contexts, but not others. Based on the assumption that men and women tend to differ in self versus other orientation, experimental instructions varied whether our participants’ (n = 169) creative efforts benefit the self or others, and whether creativity occurred under conditions of threat or not. In the absence of threat, women outperformed men in the originality of their creative efforts when the task was beneficial to others. This effect was eliminated in the presence of competitive threat. In contrast to some previous work, threat also increased creative performance under some circumstances. Results also revealed gender differences in self-assessment of creativity such that women seemed to be somewhat more attuned to the objective level of the originality of their creative performance than men. The discussion focuses on implications for research on gender differences in creativity, arguing that researchers must appreciate that gender differences in creativity, so far as they exist, are likely embedded in specific situational contexts.     

Eyewitness Recall and Duration Estimates in Field Settings1

Witnesses were tested for either interrogative recall or narrative recall of a young woman to whom they had spoken for approximately 15 s, 2 min earlier. Interrogative responses were more complete and more accurate, but also more error prone than narrative responses. Men and women showed similar performance on most characteristics, but men were more confident in their responses. A negative correlation was found between age of witnesses and accuracy of recall. Women made significantly longer duration estimates of the target-witness encounters than did men. However, both men and women were relatively accurate in duration estimates when they used mental imagery rehearsal prior to giving duration judgments. The results were interpreted in terms of their forensic significance.     

Self-Affirmation in Occupational Training: Effects on the Math Performance of French Women Nurses under Stereotype Threat

This study examined the conditions affecting the math performance of French female student nurses in a setting where they were likely to experience stereotype threat (supposedly poor scientific skills), but in a context which enhanced their status as women and strengthened their self-affirmation. We hypothesized that self-affirmation through their nursing identity would deflect the negative impact of the stereotype threat on performance and would reduce the threat’s harmful impact on attentional processes, as reflected in perceived stress, perceived concentration and self-estimate of performance. Ninety-five female students enrolled in a nursing school in France carried out a dosage calculation—a typical nursing task—which drew directly on their math skills. They were assigned to one of four experimental conditions: 2 (threat: task presented as being diagnostic of women’s difficulty in math calculation compared to men vs. no threat: task presented as a typical nursing-school exercise) x 2 (self-affirmation: choosing from a list and describing the most important characteristics for them as women and as nurses vs. control condition: same task but for the characteristics that were least important for them but important for other people). As expected, under stereotype threat relating to their math skills, women performed better under the self-affirmation condition than under the control condition. However, this improved performance was associated with a lower self-estimate of their performance. We discuss the consequences, in this specific occupational and cultural context, on the way women can overcome the negative impact of gender stereotypes.     

The Effects of Varying Goal Difficulty Operationalizations on Goal Setting Outcomes and Processes

The three studies reported here investigated the effect of operationalization of goal difficulty on the relationship between goal difficulty and performance. Subjects were assigned goals (easy, moderately difficult, or very difficult) under either an absolute goal level or performance improvement condition. Results indicated that the goal difficulty interacted with operationalization in affecting performance. Specifically, there was a linear relationship between goal difficulty and performance when goals were operationalized in terms of absolute level, but an inverted U-relationship between these two variables when goals were operationalized in terms of performance improvement. This interaction held up despite controlling for normative goal difficulty, performance improvement difficulty and absolute goal level difficulty. The effects of operationalization seemed to be attributable to differences in self-set goal levels, particularly among high ability persons. Taken as a whole, these studies indicate that how assigned goals are derived and how they are communicated to subjects affects goal setting outcomes.