The Influence Of Stress Mindset On Working Memory Performance

Stress response is general response elicited by outer or inner stimulus. With the intensification of social competition, more and more people feel stressful, and get involved in stress situation. In general, stress response is a stressful feeling when individual are not able to get away from threatening stimulus.There is a controversy of existing literature examing the performance of working memory under stressful situation. Grum et al.(2013) tried to explain this controversy by pointing out "stress mindset", which may influence individual’s behavior under stressful situation. We used Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Test to examined relationship between individual’s stress mindset and working memory performance in stressful situation. We found that (1) SECPT is able to elicit acute stressful action in laboratory situation among Chinese adults. Compared with control group, experimental group were more anxious and had more negative emotion. however, there is no significant difference in positive emotion, what’s more, experimental group’s heart rate and skin conductance gain value is higher; (2) Acute stress situation had an impact on the performance of individual’s working memory. There is no significant difference on accuracy in low-load task(1-back), but a significant difference in high-load task(2-back); (3) in acute stress situations, individual stress trait is correlated with working memory task performance, that the more "stress" individual, the higher accuracy in working memory task.(4) individual stress trait could be changed. In acute stress situations, positive individual stress trait group, compared with negative group, have lower sense of anxiety, and a better performance on working memory tasks (2-back and 3-back). What’s more, two groups’accuracy on working memory tasks converged with practice.