The Role Of Stress Mindset On Working Memory

Working memory is a memory system that can temporarily process and store information and has limited capacity.Stress mindset refers to the mindset of how an individual views stress.If an individual thinks that stress can improve his/her stress outcomes,it means that he/she has a stress-is-enhancing mindset.In contrast,people who believe that stress will have a bad effect on results will hold a stress-is-debilitating mindset.Individuals with different views on stress are likely to have an impact on their physiological and emotional arousal under stress,thus further affecting their performance in working memory tasks.But at present,only one study has explored the effect of stress mindset induction on working memory under acute stress.However,there was a lack of objective physiological indicators in this study.Therefore,it is not clear whether the stress-is-enhancing mindset can actually reduce the stress response in the stressful situation.Based on this,this study takes college students as the research objects,revises and tests the reliability and validity of the Stress Mindset Measure(SMM)revised by Crum in Study 1,and discusses the influence of stress mindset on working memory under acute stress in Study 2.In study 1,638 participants completed SMM,Trait Anxiety Inventory(T-AI),The Perceived Stress Scale(PSS),and The Self-Management subscale(TEIQUe-SF).Then the samples were randomly divided into exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.The results showed that:(1)the Stress Mindset Measure included two factors:stress-is-enhancing mindset and stress-is-debilitating mindset,and the factor load was above 0.6.(2)Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the two-factor model fitted well(χ~2/df=2.607,CFI=0.942,TLI=0.914,RMSEA=0.070,SRMR=0.038).(3)The cronbach’s alpha of total table is 0.75,the test-retest reliability r=0.54 after 4-5weeks.(4)The Stress Mindset Measure was negatively correlated with trait anxiety and perceived Stress,and positively correlated with emotion management.This indicates that the Stress Mindset Measure has good reliability and validity and can be used to measure the stress mindset as an appropriate tool.Study 2 do a pre-experiment for evaluate the stress mindset videos at first.After that we do a formal experiment was conducted to research the effect of stress mindset on working memory.38 college students were selected to evaluate the arousal,emotional valence and stress mindset of Crum et al.’s stress mindset videos.There were two versions of the stress mindset videos,the stress-is-enhancing mindset group watches the stress-is-enhancing video,and stress-is-debilitating mindset group watches the stress-is-debilitating video.Subjects filled in questionnaires before and after watching the videos.The results showed that:(1)there was no significant difference in arousal between the groups.(2)in the emotional valence,the negative emotions before video induction were significantly higher than after video induction in the stress-is-debilitating mindset group;the positive emotions after video induction were significantly higher than before video induction in stress-is-enhancing mindset group.(3)there was no significant difference in the stress mindset score before video induction between the two groups;the scores of stress mindset before video induction in the stress-is-enhancing mindset group were significantly lower than those after video induction,while those in the stress-is-debilitating mindset group were on the contrary,which indicated that the stress mindset video could effectively control the subjects’stress mindset and could be used in subsequent studies.In the formal experiment of Study 2,a mixed experimental design of 2(group:stress-is-enhancing mindset and stress-is-debilitating mindset)×2(working memory load:0-back and 2-back)was adopted.54 college students were randomly divided into two groups,and different types of videos were used to induce the subjects’stress-is-enhancing mindset or stress-is-debilitating mindset.In the experiment,the MAST paradigm was used as the stress-inducing task,and the N-back task was used to measure the working memory refresh ability of the subjects.Three times of Stress Mindset Measure,four times of State-Trait Anxiety Inventory,and four times of Positive and Negative Affect Schedule were filled in,and 6 times of heart rate and 5 times of cortisol were collected as physiological indicators.The result display that:(1)there were no significant differences in the stress mindset measure score between groups when the subjects just arrived at the laboratory.The score of the stress-is-enhancing mindset group was significantly higher than the stress-is-debilitating mindset group after the video induction,and in the end of the experiment.It shows that the induction of stress mindset video is effective.(2)the anxiety level after the stress task was significantly higher than that at other time points,and the negative emotion after the stress task was significantly higher than that after the 0-back task and 2-back task.the cortisol level at T4(about 15 minutes after the stress task)was significantly higher than that at other time points,and the heart rate level at the stress stage was significantly higher than that at other time points.This revealed that the MAST paradigm adopted in this study can effectively induce the stress response of subjects.(3)No difference was found in heart rate and cortisol among the stress mindset groups under stress,indicating that the stress mindset groups did not affect the heart rate level and salivary cortisol concentration under stress.(4)the accuracy of 0-back task was significantly higher than that of 2-back task,and the reaction time of 2-back response was significantly higher than that of 0-back task.No significant differences were found between groups in the reaction time and accuracy of different working memory loads.This suggests that the stress mindset does not affect working memory performance.The following conclusions can be drawn from the above studies:(1)Chinese version of Stress Mindset Measure has good reliability and validity,which can be used as a research tool to measure stress mindset.(2)The stress mindset video can effectively induce individual stress mindset.(3)Stress mindset does not affect the stress response and working memory performance of individuals under acute stress.