Decision-making under Stress
A new review
based on a research shows that acute stress affects the way the brain considers
the advantages and disadvantages, causing it to focus on pleasure and ignore
the possible negative (負(fù)面的) consequences of a decision.
The research
suggests that stress may change the way people make choices in predictable
ways.
“Stress
affects how people learn,” says Professor Mara Mather. “People learn better
about positive than negative outcomes under stress.”
For example,
two recent studies looked at how people learned to connect images(影像) with either rewards or punishments. In one
experiment, some of the participants were first stressed by having to give a
speech and do difficult math problems in front of an audience; in the other,
some were stressed by having to keep their hands in ice water. In both cases,
the stressed participants remembered the rewarded material more accurately and
the punished material less accurately than those who hadn’t gone through the
stress.
This
phenomenon is likely not surprising to anyone who has tried to resist eating
cookies or smoking a cigarette while under stress –at those moments, only the
pleasure associated with such activities comes to mind. But the findings
further suggest that stress may bring about a double effect. Not only are
rewarding experiences remembered better, but negative consequences are also
easily recalled.
The research
also found that stress appears to affect decision-making differently in men and
women. While both men and women tend to focus on rewards and less on
consequences under stress, their responses to risk turn out to be different.
Men who had
been stressed by the cold-water task tended to take more risks in the
experiment while women responded in the opposite way. In stressful situations
in which risk-taking can pay off big, men may tend to do better, when caution
weighs more, however, women will win.
This
tendency to slow down and become more cautious when decisions are risky might
also help explain why women are less likely to become addicted than men: they
may more often avoid making the risky choices that eventually harden into
addiction.
1.We can learn from the passage that people under
pressure tend to ______.
A．keep rewards
better in their memory
B．recall
consequences more effortlessly
C．make risky
decisions more frequently
D．learn a
subject more effectively
2.According to the research, stress affects people
most probably in their ______.
A．ways of
making choices B．preference
for pleasure
C．tolerance of
punishments D．responses to
suggestions
3.The research has proved that in a stressful
situation, ______.
A．women find it
easier to fall into certain habits
B．men have a
greater tendency to slow down
C．women focus
more on outcomes
D．men are more
likely to take risks
