Critical Decision Making Essay

This analysis persists of key points, about The article “Stress and the brain by Janet Elder”. The author forged an excellent informative piece to educate the reader on the effects of stress on the brain. The author states that “Stress can be both good and bad. It is part of life, and your brain and body respond to it”. The author clarifies that, "Whether stress is harmful or helpful depends on the amount of stress, how severe it is, and how long it lasts".

Stress causes people to make unnecessary mistakes; but these types of mistakes are about life or death. Several recent studies

When put under stress, both humans and baboons have cortisol and adrenaline found in their blood. These hormones are critical for survival, and other physical changes in the body such as a racing heart, increased blood pressure, and quickly responding muscles are all present when the body is put under stress. However, in regard to humans, these same physical responses can occur when the body is not in a life in death situation. Instead, it is common for psychological stresses such as public speaking, taking a test, paying taxes, or driving a vehicle to invoke the same physiological responses as someone in a critical situation. This can be unhealthy for the human body, as many people can get worked up over multiple stressors in one day,

Stress impacts one’s normal actions which can result in bad behavior impacted by stress. On the cattle car to buchenwald, a son attacks and kills his father for a piece of bread.In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel states, “He collapsed. But his fist was clutching a small crust. He wanted to raise it to his mouth. But the other threw threw himself on him. The old man mumbled something, groaned, and died” (101). The son

Cognitive strategies allow the person to decipher stress in a different way. A person can reduce the significance of the strain, or maximize the

Stress was induced by using a cold pressor task where participants must keep a hand in water and ice for as long as they can. The control group put a hand into warm water (Lighthall et al., 2012). Under the fMRI, the participants completed a BART decision task which involved rewards proportionate with decided risk (Lighthall et al., 2012).

(Massa et al, 2002, pg 3). According to Flin (1997, pg 183), Stress can produce an impressive catalogue of debilitating effects on decision making, performance. Typical reported problems are narrowing of attention (tunnel vision), lack of concentration, over reliance on heuristics and rules of thumb, and susceptibility to decision biases.

Those in high-stress conditions could not distinguish relevant from irrelevant information while tackling difficult problems. Some of the problems were unsolvable. High levels of stress increased anxiety and subjects focused on irrelevant tasks. This can further be complicated by low latent inhibition. People with low latent inhibition tend to be flooded with stimuli, making it difficult to screen out information that have previously been tagged as useless (Kaufman, 2013). People with reduced latent inhibition and a high IQ tend to be creative (Carson, 2011). Conditioned emotional responses are also sensitive to latent

Boyes and French (2010) conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis that participants who were assigned to the high-stress condition would deem the task more negatively and used more emotion-focused coping than participants in the mild-stress condition, and if high-neuroticism participants were placed in either the high-or mild-stress condition they would report the task more negatively and use less task-focused coping than low-neuroticism participants.

Smeets et al. (2006) studied acute psychosocial stressor and the corresponding cortisol levels to see the effect on source monitoring. In their research study, 82% of their subjects had a cortisol in response to their stressor. Like Buchanan and Tranel they split the subjects into high and low cortisol responder groups, 185% and 75% cortisol increases respectively. Despite the large difference in cortisol response, they found there was little to no change in results for the two groups. They had high performance in correct choices, low false alarms, and high recognition memory score. Stressed subjects showed superior performance in determining verbalized internal sources, recognition, telling distracters apart, and had less false alarms. There was not a significant difference in performance between low and high cortisol responders. So Smeets

According to Laura King stress is “the responses of individuals to environmental stressors [changes].” In psychology stress is used in a much longer scale. When the body comes to the sense of fear, the brain reacts with responses such as sweaty palms, fast heartbeat and restlessness to name a few. In psychology, the topic of stress can be though-provoking because it is one of the first insights into the human brain. When things start to be stimulus in the body that is a sign of the nervous system beginning, this is interesting to psychologist because their whole career is centered on how the brain works and functions to other things. When placed in our own lives stress can easily consume one’s thoughts and actions. Most of the time when thinking about

There are, obviously, intense subject matters, which can bring about genuine thought to be troublesome when you are amidst it. The trap there is to foresee what may happen, and think about it before hand. However there is an almost negligible difference in the middle of stressing and dissecting conceivable outcomes. Attempt to keep away from that

In reaction to a stressor, such as sense of danger, our body’s natural defenses kick into high gear in a quick reflex method known as the “fight-or-flight” response. When this happens, the nervous system releases a flood of hormones called cortisol and adrenaline, shifting the body into gear and enabling us to meet the challenge of the particular stressor. In this incredible process, our body is protecting us by supporting us to stay focused and alert. In emergencies, stress can actually save our life by giving us extra power to defend ourselves. Stress can keep us on our toes and ready to meet challenges. Beyond a certain point, however, stress has the ability to damage our health, relationships, and quality of life.

People who have episodic acute stress are always in a hurry and take on too much that they can handle (Conway, Lauvray-Bouillet, Meyer, Rahman, 2014).

Being a manager or leader entails having to make decisions and the industry or job setting that a manager has generally dictates the volume of decision making that will take place during a normal business day. Examples of these decisions might include but are not limited to goals and objectives, hiring, terminating, promoting, budgeting, training, organizational design and performance standards. The decisions that are made by managers and leaders can carry influence throughout every level of the organization and can have both positive and negative consequences for all of those involved. Bosses, peers, and subordinates are influenced alike when decisions are made. Depending on the model used, stress can play an integral part in the