Under Pressure : The Effect of Negative Emotional States on Stress Coping

Abstract: Individuals exhibit different reactions to stress, both between individuals and within individuals at different time points. A person’s current emotional state is one of the primary factors that influences how they handle a stressful situation. Someone who is feelingdepressed or anxious may not cope with stress as well as when they are feeling at peace. Another factor that impacts an individual’s ability to cope with stress is being, or at least feeling, in control of the stressful situation. Uncontrollable stress can cause greater emotional disruption and negatively affect behaviour and motivation. Stress-related psychiatric disorders are common today, and research in this field is essential to help individuals improve their stress-coping abilities. In this study, we measured physiological stress responses (heart rate variability and skin conductance) while participants performed a widelyused stress induction task and a novel stress induction task that systematically varied controllability. Before the tasks, participants reported their baseline levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Our goal was to investigate if negative emotional states predicted the physiological stress response and if stress reactivity to the well-established task was related to stress reactivity when facing an uncontrollable stressor. We hypothesised that individuals who experience more negative emotional states would exhibit a stronger physiological stress response to both tasks. The data we obtained from 61 participants indicated that participants reacted differently to the two stress tasks, but we did not observe any significant impact of depression, anxiety, or stress levels.