Can self-affirmation exacerbate adverse reactions to stress under certain conditions?

Objective: Self-affirmation has repeatedly been shown to reduce adverse psychological and physiological responses to stress. However, it is plausible that self-affirmation could exacerbate negative reactions to stress under certain conditions. The current research explored whether self-affirmation would increase negative psychological responses to a stressor occurring in a central life domain characterised by low levels of control.

Design: Female participants (Study 1 N = 132; Study 2 N = 141) completed baseline measures of anxiety and mood. They were then randomly allocated to complete a self-affirmation or control task, before reading a narrative documenting a stressful birth and imagining themselves in the place of the woman giving birth. After completing this task, participants again reported their levels of anxiety and positive mood.

Main outcome measures: Anxiety and positive mood assessed at follow-up.

Results: Study 1 demonstrated that self-affirmed women experienced increased anxiety and less positive mood at follow-up, compared both to baseline and to women in the control condition. Study 2 revealed that the effect of self-affirmation on outcomes was moderated by fear of childbirth.

Conclusion: These results provide preliminary evidence that self-affirmation may worsen negative responses to stressors under certain conditions and for certain individuals.     

Obstacles to Widening Biosample Research

Science and Engineering Ethics - Switzerland has an excellent culture of medical research and is a melting pot for medical experts with international expertise. Nevertheless, as in other countries,...     

Childhood pay for grades is related to college grade point averages

In a sample of 87 college students from four junior level courses, being paid for earning good grades in childhood was related to higher college GPAs relative to students who were not paid for good grades in childhood.     

Synaesthesia,creativity and art: What is the link?

It has been suggested that individuals with synaesthesia may show heightened creativity as a result of being able to form meaningful associations between disparate stimuli (e.g. colour, sound). In this study, a large sample (N=82) of people with various kinds of synaesthesia were given two psychometric tests of creativity (Remote Associates Test, Alternate Uses Test) and were also asked about the amount of time engaged in creative arts (visual art, music). There was a significant tendency for synaesthetes to spend more time engaged in creative arts and this was, at least in part, dependent upon the type of synaesthesia experienced. For example, synaesthetes experiencing vision from music were far more likely to play an instrument than their other synaesthetic counterparts. There was no relationship between this tendency and the psychometric measures of creativity, but synaesthetes did outperform controls on one of the two psychometric measures (Remote Associates). We conclude that the tendency for synaesthetes to be more engaged in art is likely to have a different mechanism to psychometric measures of creativity, and that there is no direct link between them. Although synaesthetes may well perform better on some measures of creativity, we suggest that synaesthetes have better bottom‐up access to certain associations, but are not necessarily better able to use them flexibly (in divergent thinking).