Thesis Presentation

Intro Slide:

Hi everyone! So before we get started, I want to ask everyone a question: 

Have you ever been in a stressful situation where your heart was racing, your mouth went dry, you got a headache, or even felt a little nauseous? If any of that sounds familiar, could I get a quick show of hands?

Yeah. So, for those of you who raised your hands, you have firsthand experience of how stress can directly affect your body.

But we all probably didn’t raise our hands for the same things. And what I’d like to show here is that these are all physiological responses to stress, but not everyone’s body reacts to stress in the same way.

So for my project, I was very curious to look into the factors that explain WHY people’s bodies respond to stress differently.

And One factor that might explain these differences is actually how people regulate their emotions. 

Hypothesis Results Slide:

Now as for my hypotheses, unfortunately, overall emotion dysregulation did not significantly predict heart rate reactivity or recovery. BUT each of these figures were trending in the direction I anticipated

Taking a closer look at these figures, you’ll see that there is a rough linear relationship in both of these models, where as participants’ total DERS score increased, so did their HR Recovery and HR Reactivity. This alone is a meaningful contribution to the dysregulation literature, as researchers have debated the direction of these relationships. 

Of course, we should be interpreting this   with caution, but while the overall model did not reach significance, the .25 and .28 effect sizes for each of these tests even with the small sample sizes is something to consider, as maybe these would’ve reached significance with more statistical power.

Rationale for Null Results Slide:

But this begs the question of course, why were these models not significant? 

One possibility might simply be that the TSST, being very stressful but also cognitively demanding, might have obscured any individual differences. A lot of dysregulatory behaviors require a degree of cognitive energy that the TSST might not give people time for. 

For example, if I struggle with a lack of emotional clarity, I need time to struggle to understand my emotions, and if I'm too fixated on performing a speech and saying the right words and interpreting the panelists' reactions, this extra layer of processing might not even cross my mind.

HOWEVER, if this were the case, we would expect differences to show when participants reached the recovery period and had time to process their emotions. 

But we didnt see that.

So, a more plausible explanation might be that a total score might not be useful for examining this construct. Dysregulation is multidimensional, and the DERS measure is specifically split up into different subscales to reflect different types of behavior.

When you calculate a composite, youre removing alot of that nuance, and different subscale scores might cancel each other out.

Nonacceptance slide:

Related to that though, I did actually have some results that achieved significance. Now if you remember, I was curious whether specific components of dysregulation (or DERS subscales) would relate to stress responses differently, and I had significant findings with the nonacceptance of emotional responses subscale. 

So there are 3 items in this one which I’ve included here, but overall, this subscale gauges people’s secondary emotional responses to their negative emotions. 

And that “secondary” level of processing is going to be important later….

Nonacceptance and physio slide

So Nonacceptance’s relationship with our physio data! Nonaccpetance predicted both heart rate reactivity AND recovery, meaning participants who report more nonacceptance had a bigger increase in HR from baseline to speech and a slower return to baseline heart rate during recovery.

I also did some post-hoc analyses and later found that when controlling for baseline, Nonacceptrance scores significantly predicted heart rate during the SPEECH phase.

So we really get this picture that individuals self-reporting higher nonacceptance are not necessarily more physiologically aroused in general, but they appear to exhibit increased arousal when stress does occur.

Nonacceptance’s Cognitive Demands Slide

So, this is a bit intuitive right? People who dont accept their negative emotions have a more pronounced physical reaction when experiencing those emotions. But why might that be the case? 

Well going back to that secondary level of processing I mentioned earlier, what is likely happening is that formulating that negative reaction requires an additional level of processing that increases  sympathetic activation. 

And some emotional supresion literature already supports this. Suppresion is quite similar to nonacceptance, and one meta analysis found that participants who suppressed displayed greater physiological reactivity across several different stress tasks. So, there is precedent for my findings. 

Specific to Stress Reactivity Slide

And what makes even more sense is that this relationship with nonacceptance is specific to stress reactivity! So during the speech phase when everything is most cognitively demanding, nonacceptance significantly predicted an increased heart rate response

People might feel anxious during the TSST, but it makes sense that the people who are ANXIOUS about being ANXIOUS would display increased arousal during the stressor 

Limitations and Future Directions Slide:

Alright, so what do we make of all this? First, every study is not without its limitations, and my project had several, the most glaring being the small sample size. With only 35 participants, this study was pretty underpowered. There were several other results I didn’t mention that were trending in the right direction or approaching significance, and a larger sample may have produced significant results. 

Aside from addressing these limitations, 

As I hope I made evident, I think the stress physio literature would benefit from exploring DERS subscales instead of total scores in the future. And actually, there is a lot of clinical literature that already does this, as different types of dysregulation are more closely related to different conditions.  

For example, nonacceptance has been frequently linked with disorders like generalized anxiety disorder and OCD.

But more importantly, because we know specific groups struggle with specific types of dysregultion, we can begin making targeted interventions for these groups. For example, we know that nonacceptance needs a second layer of processing, but that second level of judgment can be interrupted with strategies like cognitive reappraisal training.

And finally, returning back to that negative health consequences idea I mentioned at the start and because dysregulation is linked to cardiovascular disease risk, we should also consider variables such as heart rate variability to get a better physio profile of people at higher risk.

Takeaways Slide:

So, I do hope you’ll leave here with a couple takeways

First, how you manage your emotions can actually shape your body’s stress response, and importantly, it matters how you struggle with those emotions, not just whether you do to begin with.

And second, kind of the major one from my findings with nonacceptance, being “anxious about being anxious” seems to have real physiological consequences. So that second layer of judging yourself might actually be what hurts you in the long run,

And all of this is to say that while we can’t always control when stress shows up, we might have more control over how it affects us than we think.