The Effect of Stress on Visual Selective Attention Regarding Conscientiousness

The aim of this research was to investigate the effect of stress on visual selective (focused) attention regarding the moderating effect of personality factor of conscientiousness.

60 subjects were chosen by multi-stage random sampling method with respect to personality and neuropsychological criteria of the research and were placed in three equal groups (two experimental groups and one control group; each group consisted of 20 subjects). Cognitive stressor tasks were first administered to the subjects in both experimental groups, and their visual selective attention was assessed subsequently. The control group’s visual selective attention was assessed without administrating any cognitive stressor tasks. Two indexes were used to assess the visual selective attention: counting error and classification error. The research data were analyzed by t-test for two independent samples.

The results showed that stress significantly increases the rate of both counting error and classification error (p<0.0001). It was also shown that conscien-tiousness contributes in stress effect and causes additional significant increase in both counting and classification errors (p<0.0001).

The research results revealed that stress significantly reduces visual selective (focused) attention to neutral stimuli and conscien-tiousness accentuates this negative effect.