Optimism, pessimism, and false failure feedback: Effects on vigilance performance

Abstract

Following the logic of a prior experiment (Seligman et al., 1990) with varsity collegiate swimmers, sixty student volunteers performed a brief, but highly stressful vigilance task. Half were then given false feedback indicating poor performance; the others experienced a non-evaluative display at that point. All were then asked to repeat the vigil. Half the observers were assessed as high optimists and half as high pessimists. The pessimists showed a steeper vigilance decrement than the optimists, consistent with a model (Scheier and Carver, 1987) that proposes that pessimists are more emotion-focused under stress than optimists, and hence would be less attentive to the vigilance display, regardless of feedback condition. The false negative feedback actually turned out to be ineffective; hence, based on Seligman's account of the swimmer study, which requires effective negative feedback, there should have been no vigilance performance difference between optimists and pessimists, either pre-or post-feedback.

A transcranial Doppler sonography study of shoot/don’t-shoot responding

“…Half of the reduction in signal detection performance occurs within the first 15 min of a vigilance task, and the decrement has reached the lowest performance within 20-35 min (Teichner, 1974). Current research suggests that performance decreases as quickly as 5-10 min after task onset (Helton, Dember, Warm, & Matthews, 1999). In a sense, the difficulty of boring, low-target-frequency vigilance tasks is the mental effort that must be expended to maintain attention when nothing about the task elicits attention exogenously (Hart & Staveland, 1988).…”

A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of sustained attention to local and global target features

“…Four subscales of the DSSQ will be used, similar to a number of previous vigilance studies (Helton et al, 2000(Helton et al, , 2004Szalma et al, 2004Szalma et al, , 2006. These subscales were Task-Related Cognitive Interference (worry about things related to the task), Task-Unrelated Cognitive Interference (worry about things not related to the task), Tense Arousal (nervous-relaxed) and Energetic Arousal (alert-lethargic).…”

Task Engagement, Attention, and Executive Control

“…A series of studies by Szalma (e.g., Szalma et al, 2006) and Helton (e.g., Helton et al, 1999) have implicated optimism-pessimism as an influence on engagement. Our research has found that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness are modestly, but fairly consistently, correlated with engagement in performance settings .…”