We all know that stress can harm your health but studies show it can it also harm your decision-making skills.
Has stress ever led you to make a choice that didn’t work out well?
In the Opinion essay “Are Women Better Decision Makers?” Therese Huston writes:
Neuroscientists have uncovered evidence suggesting that, when the pressure is on, women bring unique strengths to decision making.
Mara Mather, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, and Nichole R. Lighthall, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Duke University, are two of the many researchers who have found that under normal circumstances, when everything is low-key and manageable, men and women make decisions about risk in similar ways. We gather the best information we can, we weigh potential costs against potential gains, and then we choose how to act. But add stress to the situation — replicated in the lab by having participants submerge their hands in painfully cold, 35-degree water — and men and women begin to part ways.
[For more of this story, written by Shannon Doyne, go to http://learning.blogs.nytimes....make-good-decisions/]
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