People who are stressed, handle bad news better

■ Stress has its brighter side

London, Aug. 7: Feeling stressed or anxious makes people more able to process and internalise bad news, a study has found.

The research, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, reveals that a known tendency of people to take more notice of good news than bad news — the optimism bias — disappears when people feel threatened.

“Generally, people are quite optimistic — we ignore the bad and embrace the good. And this is indeed what happened when our study participants were feeling calm; but when they were under stress, a different pattern emerged,” said Tali Sharot from University College London in the UK.

“Under these conditions, they became vigilant to bad news we gave them, even when this news had nothing to do with the source of their anxiety,” Sharot said.

In the lab, half of the 35 participants were told at the start that they would need to deliver a speech on a surprise topic in front of a panel of judges after completing a task — thus elevating their stress levels.

The other half was told they would complete an easy writing assignment at the end of the study.

The heightened stress among those anticipating public speaking was confirmed by measures of physiological arousal ( by testing their skin conductance and cortisol levels) and self- reported anxiety.

For the task, the participants were asked to estimate the risk level of various threatening life events.

People who were stressed were better than the more relaxed participants.