Individual Differences in Body Trust and Performance Under Pressure

This study is a two-group, between-subjects design. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of two groups: placebo or dampened stress condition. Participants in the dampened stress condition will be informed that they are taking acetaminophen, a common over-the-counter drug that has been shown to decrease stress responding. Participants in the placebo condition will be informed that they are in the placebo condition and will be taking a pill with no active ingredient. In actuality, all participants will be given a placebo pill with no active ingredients. Participants will be connected to recording equipment to measure physiological activity (i.e., electrocardiographic, impedance cardiographic, respiratory, and blood pressure). At the beginning of the session, a 5-minute resting baseline will be recorded. Blood pressure will be taken immediately before and after the baseline period. All participants will then complete a modified version of the Heartbeat Detection Task, where they will be asked to sense and report on their own heartbeats. On each trial of the task, they will hear 10 beeps triggered by their own ECG that will be concordant or discordant with their felt heartbeats. They will be asked to indicate if the beeps were concordant or discordant and provide a confidence rating of their response. Participants will then be provided with a description of the two conditions as described above. A research assistant who is blind to the condition they have been assigned will provide them with a placebo pill and a cup of water. Participants will be asked to take the pill and complete a series of questionnaires during which they are told the pill will begin to take effect. At the beginning of the surveys, they will be informed of the condition they are in (i.e., stress-dampening or placebo) and the intended effect of the pill. Next, they will complete a series of questionnaires including the short version of the intolerance of uncertainty scale (IUS-12), the body trusting scale, the multidimensional assessment of interoceptive awareness (MAIA-2), as well as basic demographic questions. Participants will then complete the speech portion of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). They will be asked to mentally prepare a 5-minute speech about why they would be an ideal candidate for a job. They will be told the speech will be videotaped and evaluated by trained judges. They will be given 2 minutes to prepare, after which they will give their speech to an experimenter who will refrain from providing any affective response. They will be asked to complete the state subscale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) twice; once before the preparation period (i.e., how they feel in anticipation of completing the task) and once after the speech period (i.e., how did they feel during the task). They will also be asked to rate the stressfulness of the task and their ability to cope with the task stress, anticipated and perceived, respectively. Blood pressure measurements will be taken after the first administration of the STAI, between the preparation period and the speech period, and after the second administration of the STAI. We predict : 1.) Both behavioral and self-report measures of body trusting will moderate the relationship between subjective stress and physiological arousal such that the relationship between these variables will be stronger at higher levels of body trusting. 2.) Both behavioral and self-report measures of body trusting will moderate the relationship between condition and subjective stress such that participants will report less subjective stress in the experimental condition than the control condition, and this difference will be more pronounced for those with lower body trusting.