Motivation, anxiety, and the difficulty of avoidant control.

Examined in 105 male undergraduates, whether avoidant control that was difficult to exercise induced greater physiologic arousal and unpleasant affect than easy-avoidant control or no-avoidant control. Two types of control difficulty were distinguished and factorially varied: control difficulty due to the effortfulness of a controlling activity and control difficulty due to uncertainty about how to exercise control over an unpleasant outcome. To examine responses under conditions where avoiding an unpleasant event is impossible, a cell was included in which Ss were not given the means by which to exercise control. In all but 1 condition, when avoidance was expected to be easy or impossible (a) pulse rates were lower, (b) digital pulse volumes were higher, (c) self-reported anxiety was lower, and (d) ratings of the stressor's unpleasantness were lower than they were when avoidance was expected to be difficult. In the high-effort-exercise/high-response-uncertainty condition, cardiovascular arousal, self-reported anxiety, and shock umpleasantness scores were relatively low, suggesting that control was sufficiently difficult in that condition to cause Ss to give up. Results are discussed in terms of a model of motivation (J. W. Brehm), conceptions of anxiety, and the relation between stress and control. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)