Many decision tasks induce stress, either because of cognitive demands or because of emotional factors. To what extent are people able to compensate for cognitive and emotional stressors by adapting their decision processes? The research will focus on how information processing strategies are adapted to variations in time pressure and emotional stress. The proposed research uses an integrated methodology involving computer simulation and experiments utilizing process-tracing methods to investigate decision making under stress at a detailed information-processing level. Computer simulation will be used to estimate the performance of various decision strategies under stressful conditions; then several experiments will examine whether individuals adapt to stress by changing processing in ways consistent with the simulation results. The studies focus on a new opportunity-cost manipulation of time pressure and two new manipulations of emotional stress, one altering the salience and vividness of the consequences of actions and one altering the difficulty of the tradeoffs involved in the choice task. ! ! F ^ ^ ( Times New Roman Symbol & Arial j j j j " h - e- e I $abstract for payne award SBR-9320106 Hal Arkes Hal Arkes
