Attitude as a Moderator of Autonomic Reactivity

态度被认为具有多种功能。它们影响感知和信息处理。这项建议试图确定到目前为止只有本建议的一个功能，即在压力环境中态度对决策的促进作用。我们从先前的心理生理学工作中了解到，涉及积极应对威胁或挑战的任务会引起心率、心输出量、收缩压和心肌收缩能力更大的增加。这项研究的问题是，在涉及既定态度的情况下，应对威胁的个人是否会表现出比在新奇(态度)环境中的个人更少的反应能力。该提案的力量在于，它将心理生理学测量与态度测量和归纳方面的专业知识结合在一起，为这一重要问题提供了答案。这两种方法的结合是新颖而重要的，并承诺提供许多关于社会认知(态度)和生理相互作用的信息。这项研究可以大大加深对压力对人类功能和表现的影响的理解。

Attitudes are thought to serve many functions. They influence perception and information processing. This proposal seeks to identify a function that to this point has only ben suggested, namely, the facilitative effects of attitudes on decision making in stressful contexts. We know from prior psychophysiological work that tasks involving active coping with threat or challenging evoke greater increments in heart rate, cardiac output, systolic blood pressure, and myocardial contractility. The issue of this research is whether an individual coping with a threat in a situation involving well-established attitudes will show less reactivity than an individual in a novel (attitudinal) setting. The strength of the proposal is that it melds psychophysiological measurement with expertise in attitudinal measurement and induction to provide an answer to this important question. The combination of these two approaches is novel and important, and promises much information on the interaction of social cognition (attitudes) and physiology. This research could add appreciably to out understanding of the effects of stress on human functioning and performance.