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Effects of interrupting the process of preparation for film stress
Author(s) -
NIEMELÄ PIRKKO
Publication year - 1975
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1975.tb00196.x
Subject(s) - skin conductance , psychology , stress (linguistics) , interval (graph theory) , physiological stress , social psychology , medicine , mathematics , combinatorics , biomedical engineering , physiology , linguistics , philosophy
.— The process of preparation for exposure to a stressful film was initiated by describing the film. The subjects were told that the film would be shown 3 days later, whereas the preparation process was interrupted by showing the film unexpectedly after shorter time intervals. It was predicted that the stress reaction, as indicated by skin conductance (SC) responses to the stressful scenes, would be lower the longer the pre‐stress interval. Instead, an opposite relationship was found for scenes at the beginning of the film. The self‐report data indicated that the shorter the interval between the actual and expected times of the film showing, the more subjects suppressed thoughts associated with it. It is suggested that the SC patterns obtained indicate an ‘astonishment’ response to sudden confrontation with suppressed material.