Attitude as a Moderator of Autonomic Reactivity

人们认为态度有许多功能。它们影响感知和信息处理。本建议旨在确定迄今为止只被提出的一个功能，即态度对压力环境下决策的促进作用。我们从先前的心理生理学研究中知道，涉及积极应对威胁或挑战的任务会引起心率、心输出量、收缩压和心肌收缩力的更大增加。这项研究的问题是，一个人在处理威胁时，是否会比一个人在处理新的（态度）环境时表现出更少的反应。该建议的优势在于，它将心理生理测量与态度测量和归纳方面的专业知识结合起来，为这个重要问题提供了答案。这两种方法的结合是新颖而重要的，并为社会认知（态度）和生理的相互作用提供了许多信息。这项研究可以大大增加我们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.