Exploring effects of acute stress on attention and visual cognition
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Examining the effects of pressor tasks on attention and visual cognition.
IRAS ID
208860
Contact name
Stuart Pugh
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 6 months, 22 days
Research summary
The purpose of the study is to examine how acute stress affects different aspects of attention in a healthy population.\n\nThree attentional networks have been hypothesized - Alerting, Orienting and Executive Control - each controlling different aspects of attention. Existing research has found that acute stress can have positive or negative effects on attention but has not attributed these effects to any specific network. Using a socially evaluative cold pressor task (participants submerge forearm in cold water whilst being filmed) to induce stress, attention changes will be measured using the Attentional Network Task. In addition to subjective responses, physiological measures will be taken via saliva sample in order to understand the biological reaction to stress and how this is linked to changes in cognition.\n\nHealthy, non-clinical volunteers without any history of mental or neurological illness, or communicable diseases will be tested at the University of Southampton, within the School of Psychology. \n\nParticipants will volunteer using an online booking system where the exclusionary criteria will be made clear prior to attending an experimental test session lasting three hours. They will provide baseline scores for various aspects of mood, working memory and attention before being exposed to the acute stressor/control for a maximum of 3 minutes. Participants will then repeat the attention tasks twice in order to understand the effect of stress on attentional networks. In addition, participants will provide saliva samples (using saliva salivettes) at 5 time points across the session in order to elucidate physiological reaction to stress and map this to any cognitive changes.\n\nParticipants saliva samples will be labelled with unique identifiers so that they cannot be attributed to individuals and analysis will be performed by an external laboratory without access to participant information. Samples will not be available to other studies and will be destroyed following analysis.
REC name
North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/NW/0577
Date of REC Opinion
27 Jul 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion