A study was conducted on individual differences in informational coping styles and coronary-prone behavior patterns regarding their mediating roles in the experience of subjective and physiological arousal prior to and during stressful cognitive task performance. Two-hundred and forty-six college-aged subjects were categorized according to coping style, information-monitors and information-blunters, and according to coronary-prone behavior pattern, Type A and Type B. Ninety-six of these participants were given either brief or detailed information about a difficult anagram task, during which noise was administered to one half of the subjects. Repeated measures of state anxiety, body sensations, and heart rate were collected at pre-information (baseline), post-information, and post-task phases. A post-experimental questionnaire concerning self-report of arousal created by the information and noise manipulations, and by the anagram task; and concerning attribution of quality of cognitive task performance was completed by each subject at the end of the experiment A significant positive correlation was found between Type A behavior pattern and information-seeking coping strategy. There were significant main effects of phases for all dependent variables: state anxiety, negative body sensations, and heart rate. Most notably, a significant information x coping style interaction showed that information-monitors experienced less anxiety when given detailed information, their preferred amount, than when exposed to brief information. The converse was true for the information-blunters, substantiating the conclusion that they prefer a brief amount of information concerning an aversive event. This interaction supports the primary hypothesis of the study and documents the effects of these individual differences in information preference with a cognitive task / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_24362 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Contributors | Willis, April Sandra (Author) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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