Exploration of Psychological and Psychophysiological Measures as Predictors ofSuccessful Performance Under Stress

摘要

Based on a review of the literature and the development of a newpsychophysiological model to account for individual coping responses to stress, two investigations were conducted. The first investigation developed and validated a new Occupational Stress Assessment Inventory that better examined stress in an occupational context with measures of active coping and ability to deal with stress built into the same instrument. In the second investigation this new inventory as well as other personality measures were employed in a psychophysiological stress paradigm to directly assess the predictive power of personality and psychophysiological measures with respect to predicting performance under stress. The second investigation showed that several psychophysiological variables, such as heart iate, vagal tone and mean arterial and diastolic blood pressures, predicted performance on both simple and more complex tasks with correlations as high as .67. These results demonstrated that there are marked individual differences in psychophysiological responses under stress that reliably predict performance. In terms of parsonality measures, the data indicated that those individuals who perceived themselves as having more of an ability to cope with stress and who more actively cope with stressful situations indeed are more successful performers. These investigations support the contention that selection and classification for stressful occupations can be improved by the integration of specific personality and psychophysiological measures. It was recommended that a full field evaluation of these methods be conducted to assess the validity of these findings in specific populations of interest and to evaluate their practical feasibility.