Good decision-making is associated with an adaptive cardiovascular response to social competitive stress.
Competition elicits different psychological and cardiovascular responses depending on a person's skills. Decision-making has been considered a distal factor that influences competition, but there are no studies analyzing this relationship. Our objective was to analyze whether decision-making affects the response to competition. Specifically, we aimed to test whether good performers on a decision-making test, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), showed an adaptive cardiovascular response to competition. In all, 116 participants (44 women) performed the IGT and were classified into Good or Poor decision-makers. Subsequently, they were exposed to a stress task in two different conditions: a face-to-f…
Orientation response in low‐fat foods: Differences based on product category and gender
Positive emotion induction improves cardiovascular coping with a cognitive task
Feeling positive emotions seems to favour an adaptive cardiovascular response (greater heart rate variability, HRV), associated with improved cognitive performance. This study aims to test whether the induction of a positive emotional state produce such cardiovascular response and therefore, enhance coping and performance in Tower of Hanoi (ToH). Forty-two Participants were randomly distributed into two groups (Experimental and Control). Experimental group was subjected to the evocation of a memory of success, while control group was subjected to an attentional task before performing ToH. Heart Rate Variability (HRV), activity of the zygomatic major muscle (ZEMG) and emotions were measured.…
Hormonal and emotional responses to competition using a dyadic approach: Basal testosterone predicts emotional state after a defeat.
The present study analyzes the testosterone (T), cortisol (C) and emotional response in competitive interactions between dyads, as well as the relationship between basal T and the emotional response. Seventy-two men and women (36 dyads) participated in same-sex dyads in a face-to-face laboratory competition, and thirty-two men and women (16 dyads) carried out the same task in a non-competitive condition. Salivary samples (5 ml of saliva, plastic vials) were provided at three time points (baseline, task, and post-task), and subsequently T (pg/ml) and C (nmol/L) concentrations were measured using ELISA method. Participants completed self-reported measures of emotional valence, emotional arous…
Sex differences in autonomic response and situational appraisal of a competitive situation in young adults.
Competition is a social stressor capable of eliciting physiological responses modulated by the outcome. The main objective of this study was to analyze the psychophysiological changes associated with competition and its outcome in men and women, taking into account the role of situational appraisal. To this end, 112 young people (46 men and 66 women) participated in a laboratory task in a competitive or non-competitive condition, while Blood Pressure (BP), Heart Rate Variability (HRV), and Skin Conductance (SC) responses were measured. Our results indicate that competition elicits higher systolic blood pressure (SBP) than a non-competitive task; in addition, winners presented a greater R-R …
The Effect of Corrective Feedback on Performance in Basic Cognitive Tasks: An Analysis of RT Components
[EN] The current work examines the effect of trial-by-trial feedback about correct and error responding on performance in two basic cognitive tasks: a classic Stroop task (n = 40) and a color-word matching task (n = 30). Standard measures of both RT and accuracy were examined in addition to measures obtained from fitting the ex-Gaussian distributional model to the correct RTs. For both tasks, RTs were faster in blocks of trials with feedback than in blocks without feedback, but this difference was not significant. On the other hand, with respect to the distributional analyses, providing feedback served to significantly reduce the size of the tails of the RT distributions. Such results sugge…