Coping with Impending Stress: Psychophysiological and Cognitive Correlates of Choice

When faced with threat of shock, individuals were allowed to choose to distract themselves by listening to Muzak or to monitor cues predicting shock. Preference for monitoring information or for distraction was investigated concurrently with electrodermal and subjective arousal. Subjects preferred to monitor rather than distract themselves, particularly when shock was avoidable. Even when shock was not avoidable, some preference for information was found. Arousal, physiological and subjective, was consistently higher under monitoring conditions, and this was most pronounced when shock was unavoidable. Higher arousal accompanying information is contrary to the three major theories explaining choice of predictable threat, and the outline of a new hypothesis was proposed to account for these data.