Self-Affirmation Reduces Attentional Bias Toward Threat

The current study examines the effect of stress on cognition, and the impact selfaffirmation has on the negative effects of stress. We introduced a threat manipulation of an impromptu speech, which was intended to significantly raise participants state anxiety. Prior to implementing this experimental stressor, we implemented an emotional intervention called a self-affirmation. In this self-affirmation, participants reinforced their most valued characteristics. Self-affirming was hypothesized to have the ability to alleviate the negative effects of the stressor on cognition, which was measured with three specific components. First, self-reported anxiety was measured throughout the experiment to assess changes in levels of anxiety. Second, a two-part thought suppression task was implemented to test the individual’s ability to regulate intrusions from neutral thoughts compared to stressful thoughts. Third, the high level effects of stress were tested using reaction time to threat related stimuli. The findings of the experiment demonstrate that self-affirmation has the ability to effectively reduce attentional bias towards negative, threat-related stimuli when individuals were under a fairly high amount of self-reported stress. In addition, the current study demonstrates that self-reported levels of anxiety did not change as a result of the self-affirmation. Rather, the benefits of the self-affirmation were seen in improvements in cognitive performance. Self-Affirmation Reduces Attentional Bias Toward Threat 3 Self-Affirmation Reduces Attentional Bias Toward Threat Stress is an unwanted characteristic that has been a growing topic of research in the field of Psychology. Most studies show that stress negatively impacts people; it influences our health, (Phillips, 2011) our attention towards negative information, (BarHaim et al., 2007), (Klein & Harris, 2009) and our cognitive abilities (Klein & Boals, 2001). Despite the encompassing influence of stress, the literature lacks adequate techniques that successfully reduce these negative outcomes. By implementing an experimental stressor, in which participants were told they would be giving a speech that would be videotaped and later critiqued, the current study tested whether the negative effects of this stressor could be alleviated by an emotional intervention called a self-affirmation. Because self-affirmation has been shown to benefit people in many different situations, (which will be discussed in detail later) it may also be beneficial in reducing the negative effects of stress on symptoms of anxiety and cognition. This was tested using self-reported and cognitive experimental measures. When researching the effects of stress and anxiety, it is important to distinguish two types of anxiety, trait and state anxiety. Trait anxiety is a baseline characteristic of how anxious an individual tends to be in general, while state anxiety is how anxious an individual is at the current moment (Edwards et al., 2010). In terms of anxiety, research shows that stress has a significant impact on attention. In a study conducted to determine the effects of stress in trait and state anxious people, it was found that emotional selectivity (orienting attention towards emotional material in general) was mediated by state anxiety, indicating that the more stressed people were, the more attentive they were toward emotional information (Bar-Haim et al., 2007). Additionally, negative selectivity (orienting attention towards negative material specifically) was Self-Affirmation Reduces Attentional Bias Toward Threat 4 mediated by both trait and state anxiety, indicating that state anxious people respond slower to negatively valenced words in a Stroop task (which will be explained later), and this effect is especially true for trait anxious individuals (Rutherford et al., 2004). A similar effect was found in another study where high trait anxious people were shown to respond slower to negative stimuli because it was thought to be more interfering compared to neutral stimuli (MacLeod & Mathews, 1988). Research also shows that stress can have a negative effect on cognition. People experiencing life stressors put forth more working memory resources towards suppressing unwanted thoughts and as a result, their working memory suffers because they have limited resources available for other tasks (Klein & Boals, 2001), (Engle, 2010). This idea that stressful thoughts affect working memory is also related to the theory of mental control (Wegner, 1994). The theory of mental control states that because people experiencing stress are focusing their efforts to try not to think about unwanted thoughts, and because attempting to block these thoughts requires substantial cognitive demand, they will inevitably perform worse on subsequent tasks they attempt to complete (Wegner, 1994). Collectively, research shows that it is extremely difficult to ignore stress, and that even the act of attempting to ignore stress has negative effects. One possible technique that may reduce the negative effects of stress lies within an emotional intervention based on the self-affirmation theory. The process of a selfaffirmation can involve processes such as actively writing, or choosing highly selfrelatable values from a list. First proposed by C. M. Steele (1988), the theory of selfaffirmation states that people are driven to protect their self-integrity. Once someone’s self-integrity is threatened, the proceeding actions a person takes are particularly aimed Self-Affirmation Reduces Attentional Bias Toward Threat 5 at restoring their self-integrity. A specific way of accomplishing this is through selfaffirming highly important and relatable values (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). For example, choosing two or three personally relevant values from a list, and then writing about why these values are important, engages the person in the process of reaffirming their beliefs. Instead of responding to a threat with defensive biases (such as dismissing, denying or avoiding), self-affirming gives the individual the opportunity to respond to the threat indirectly, and allows a chance to focus on valuable characteristics not related to the threat but related to ones self integrity (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Through this process, people can be distracted from the current stressor, and realize that there are more important characteristics they value that are not being threatened. Once this idea is achieved, people can come back and approach the stressor more open mindedly and less defensively, which can lead to improvements in performance on the task at hand. Self-affirmations have been proven useful against threats in a multitude of settings, where the affirmation was unrelated to the threat. Some examples are interpreting ones negative health information (Sherman, Nelson & Steele, 2000), reducing the psychological discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance (Matz & Wood, 2005), reducing pressure in certain evaluative situations (Creswell et al., 2005), and reducing the gender achievement gap in college sciences (Miyake et al., 2010). All of these situations have a similar component of threat to ones self-integrity, much like stress. Since self-affirming has been shown to be beneficial in these settings, the current study hypothesizes that self-affirmation has the capacity to reduce the negative impact of stress on cognition. Although it seems natural that self-affirmation would be an effective buffer against the negative effects of stress, difficulty arises when attempting to test this theory Self-Affirmation Reduces Attentional Bias Toward Threat 6 in an experimental setting. The reason for this is that people usually experience stress outside of the research laboratory, which makes it difficult to manipulate because it has to be implemented in a way that is generalizable to non-experimental settings. Consequently, experimentally inducing stress is required to test the effectiveness of selfaffirmation. One study that effectively induces stress implemented a self-affirmation followed by an experimental stressor called the Tier Social Stress task (Creswell et al., 2005). First, the experimenters had participants in the self-affirming group complete a values scale in which they assigned ratings to a list of values in their order of personal relevance, while the control group assigned ratings to unimportant values. After the affirmation, participants were introduced to the experimental stressor. They were instructed to perform a 5-minute speech task in front of two speech evaluators (who were actually confederates), which was meant to put participants under high state anxiety. The dependent variables used in the study were primarily biological, and they found that participants in the control group had significantly elevated cortisol levels (a hormone that increases with higher levels of stress) after the stress manipulation, while the affirmation did not (Creswell et al., 2005). This study successfully demonstrates that self-affirming is effective in reducing stress at a biological level. Current Study Through examining the research on self-affirmation, stress, and cognition, the current study aims to combine aspects of each domain to ask this question: does selfaffirmation have the ability to reduce the negative effects of stress on individuals? The current study introduced a stress manipulation in which participants were told they would be giving a speech that would be videotaped and later critiqued. Like the Tier Social Stress task, (Creswell et al., 2005) this was meant to put all participants under a Self-Affirmation Reduces Attentional Bias Toward Threat 7 high amount of state anxiety. Prior to the stress manipulation, participants completed either a self-affirmation writing exercise or a control writing exercise. Self-reported anxiety was measured five times throughout the experiment to see how much the stress of giving a speech influence