It\u2019s a bit surprising that stress makes people focus on the way things could go right<\/strong>, says Mara Mather of the University of Southern California, who cowrote the new review paper with Nichole R. Lighthall. \u201cThis is sort of not what people would think right off the bat,\u201d Mather says. \u201cStress is usually associated with negative experiences, so you\u2019d think, maybe I\u2019m going to be more focused on the negative outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n But researchers have found that when people are put under stress<\/strong>\u2014by being told to hold their hand in ice water for a few minutes, for example, or give a speech\u2014they start paying more attention to positive information and discounting negative information<\/strong>. \u201cStress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback,\u201d Mather says.<\/p>\n This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they\u2019re considering and less to the downsides. So someone who\u2019s deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the decision might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute.<\/p>\n The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges<\/strong>. \u201cThe compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they\u2019re less able to resist it,\u201d Mather says. So a person who\u2019s under stress might think only about the good feelings they\u2019ll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.<\/p>\n Stress also increases the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more willing to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative about risk<\/strong>. Mather links this to other research that finds, at difficult times, men are inclined toward fight-or-flight responses, while women try to bond more and improve their relationships<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe make all sorts of decisions under stress,\u201d Mather says. \u201cIf your kid has an accident and ends up in the hospital, that\u2019s a very stressful situation and decisions need to be made quickly.\u201d And, of course, big decisions can be sources of stress all by themselves and just make the situation worse<\/strong>. \u201cIt seems likely that how much stress you\u2019re experiencing will affect the way you\u2019re making the decision<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: Trying to make a big decision while you\u2019re also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[127,28,46,236,62],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1610,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions\/1610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Depression.jpg\" "\\"stress\\"")
Trying to make a big decision while you\u2019re also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that. Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward<\/strong>. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome<\/strong>.<\/p>\n