Does stress affect attention differently in men and women?
Academic stress slows down deliberate attention in men, but only slows down automatic attention in women who also show high physical stress responses.
Source
Gender moderates the association between chronic academic stress with top-down and bottom-up attention
What they did
Researchers evaluated 163 Australian university students, including 80 females, aged 18 to 34 years, to see how chronic stress and physical arousal affect attention. The students wore virtual reality headsets and heart rate monitors while completing simple, choice, and eye-tracking reaction tasks that tested deliberate and automatic attention. They also filled out questionnaires assessing their academic stress, anxiety, and fatigue levels.
What they found
For men, having high chronic academic stress directly correlated with slower choice reaction times on deliberate attention tasks. For women, chronic stress only slowed down automatic, eye-tracking reaction times when they also exhibited high sympathetic nervous system activity. Surprisingly, state anxiety levels did not show any significant relationship with how well participants performed on any of the attention tests.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study relied on a correlational design, which means it cannot prove that academic stress or physiological arousal directly caused the slower reaction times. Additionally, the university student sample reported relatively low levels of chronic academic stress overall compared to other studied student populations, meaning the findings might not apply to highly stressed individuals. Finally, because cognitive performance was only measured at a single timepoint, the researchers could not track how these relationships change over time.
Key terms
- Top-down attention
- A goal-driven form of attention where a person consciously and actively focuses on a specific task or stimulus.
- Bottom-up attention
- A stimulus-driven form of attention where a person reflexively and automatically reacts to unexpected changes in their environment.
- Effort-reward imbalance
- A model of chronic stress that occurs when a person feels the high effort they put into a role is not matched by the rewards they receive.
- Sympathovagal balance
- The dynamic relationship between the active sympathetic and resting parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system.
- Saccade
- A rapid, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two phases of fixation.
- State anxiety
- A temporary emotional state characterized by conscious feelings of apprehension, tension, and physical arousal in response to a specific situation.
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Quiz yourself
What research gap regarding state anxiety and chronic stress did this study aim to address?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use a virtual reality headset for the attention tests?
The virtual reality environment, called CONVIRT, was chosen because it creates a highly immersive experience that naturally induces a moderate level of physical stress, helping researchers see how attention holds up under pressure.
Why did academic stress impact men and women differently?
The researchers suggest that women might cope with academic stress differently or be more prone to stress-induced physical arousal, which impacts automatic eye movements, whereas stressed men struggle more with deliberate decision-making tasks.
How did the researchers measure physical stress during the tests?
They used wireless heart rate monitors to track the ratio of low-frequency to high-frequency heart rate variability, which indicates whether the body's 'fight-or-flight' sympathetic nervous system is dominating.
Does this mean anxious students will perform poorly on exams?
Not necessarily; the study found that short-term state anxiety was not linked to reaction times on these basic attention tasks, though complex exams may involve different cognitive processes than simple reaction tests.
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