Brain Potentials and Personality: A New Look at Stress Susceptibility

摘要

Today's soldier is confronted with physiological and psychological hardships that can affect the soldier's ability to function effectively and appropriately. This is seen as a breakdown of performance when sustained stress exceeds the soldier's capacity to cope. This experiment investigates an underlying constitutional factor, involving the central nervous system, that plays a role in how excitable an individual will be during any stressful or arousing situation. Subjects listened to 1,000-Hz tone bursts ranging 40 to 85 dB sensation level (SL) in 5-dB steps in a block-randomized fashion. The brain's electrical response to the tones was averaged and collected online. The peak amplitudes were measured and the slope of the line of best fit between evoked potential amplitude and intensity was computed. Auditory augmenters have positive slopes, that is, as intensity increases so does the evoked potential amplitude. Reducers show the opposite effect. The brain potentials become smaller or reduce as intensity increases, producing a negative slope. In addition, each subject completed Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) and Vando's Reducer-Augmenter (R-A) Scale. The slope measure was significantly correlated with the experience seeking subscale of the SSS. The results indicate that auditory augmenters prefer and seek out novel and exciting experiences. And in conjunctions with previous human and animal research, the results also suggest that the augmenter may cope better with stress and high workloads.