Selective attention to stressful distracters: effects of neuroticism and gender☆
Section snippets
Subjects
A total of 87 undergraduates, 26 males and 61 females, participated for monetary compensation or entry into a lottery system.
Overview
In the dichotic listening task, the participant was instructed to shadow (repeat aloud) three neutral passages played to the attended ear. Simultaneously, distracter words were played to the unattended ear. One neutral passage was paired with neutral distracter words, another with social-stress distracter words, and the third with academic-stress distracter words. At the
Exclusion of participants
Ten of the 87 participants were excluded from the final analysis. One participant's data set was eliminated because he was incorrectly instructed to shadow the channel to which the wordlist, not the passage, was being presented. The other nine participants were excluded due to unusually long probe RTs; in most cases, this occurred when a participant neglected to respond to an entire set of probes during a passage. As a result, there was a large gap between the mean RTs of these nine individuals
Discussion
This study demonstrates that gender and personality influenced selective attention to stress-related distracters. Neuroticism was associated with greater attention to stressful distracters, but this pattern was only evident in males. High-neurotic males were slower to respond to visual probes presented simultaneously with stressful distracters (compared to neutral distracters), suggesting these individuals paid greater attention to the stressful distracters and thus had fewer attentional
Acknowledgements
Marilyn Boltz is gratefully acknowledged for helpful comments, including the suggestion to examine sex differences.
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This research was conducted as a BA thesis at Haverford College by the first four authors.