Coping with Sales Call Anxiety and Its Effects on Protective Actions

We study how salespeople cope with sales call anxiety and find that two tactics ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions in selling interactions. That is, situation modification and attentional deployment both moderate the effects of felt physiological sensations and anxiety on protective actions.attentional deployment;coping;sales call anxiety;situation modification

Coping with Sales Call Anxiety and Its Effects on Protective Actions

We study how salespeople cope with sales call anxiety and find that two tactics ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions in selling interactions. That is, situation modification and attentional deployment both moderate the effects of felt physiological sensations and anxiety on protective actions

Neural Models of Normal and Abnormal Behavior: What Do Schizophrenia, Parkinsonism, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Depression Have in Common?

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409); National Science Foundation (IRI-97-20333

A Comparative Investigation of Associative Processes in Executive-Control Paradigms

The experiments reported in this thesis were conducted to examine the effects of executive-control and associative-learning processes on performance in conventional executive-control paradigms. For this purpose, I developed comparative task-switching and response-inhibition paradigms, which were used to assess the performance of pigeons, whose behaviour is presumably based purely on associative processes, and of humans, whose behaviour may be guided by executive control and by associative processes. Pigeons were able to perform accurately in the comparative paradigms; hence, associative-learning processes are sufficient to account for successful performance. However, some task-specific effects that can be attributed to executive-control processes, and which were found in humans applying executive control, were absent or greatly reduced in pigeons. Those effects either reflect the mental operations that are performed to ensure that a specific set of stimulus-response-contingencies is applied and any contingencies belonging to a different set are suppressed, or reflect mental preparations for the possibility that the requirement to execute a certain response suddenly changes. In particular, in Chapter 3, it is shown that the benefits of repeatedly applying the same set of stimulus-response contingencies (or, in reverse, the costs of switching from one set to another) do not apply when Pavlovian processes dominate learning, which is likely the case for pigeons. Furthermore, as shown in Chapters 4 and 5, the behavioural effects of preparing for an unpredicted change in response requirements appeared to be absent when behaviour was based purely on associative processes. Instead, associatively mediated performance was primarily influenced by the stimulus-response contingencies that were effective in each paradigm. Repeating the same response in consecutive trials facilitated the performance of pigeons and associatively learning human participants in the task-switching paradigms, and performing a particular Go response increased the pigeons' likelihood of executing that response in the following trial in two response-inhibition paradigms. In summary, any behavioural effects that can be observed at the level of abstract task requirements reflect the influence of executive-control processes, both in task-switching paradigms and in response-inhibition paradigms

Pain in context: the effect of goal competition on pain-related fear and avoidance

The Fear-Avoidance model proposes that pain-related fear and avoidance behavior play a key role in the maintenance and exacerbation of chronic pain problems. Both experimental and clinical studies have widely corroborated this model. However, there remain some unresolved issues that warrant further scientific scrutiny. One of the challenges is that pain (behavior) does not occur in a motivational vacuum, but that the goal to avoid pain interacts with other, often competing goals. It is argued that fear-avoidance models would benefit from the inclusion of a motivational perspective. The main aim of this dissertation was to experimentally investigate the impact of goal competition on pain-related fear and avoidance behavior. Additionally, we studied the presence and experience of goal conflict in a clinical population. For this purpose, a series of experiments building on a well-established differential fear conditioning paradigm, the Voluntary Joystick Movement Paradigm, was developed. In a typical experiment, healthy participants completed movements in different directions. Some of these movements were associated with painful electrocutaneous stimuli, whereas other movements were not. Likewise, movements could be associated with reward—in the form of lottery tickets—or the loss thereof. Experiment I.1 (N=55) demonstrated that presenting a concurrent reward attenuated avoidance behavior, but did not alter pain-related fear. Experiment I.2 (N=57) corroborated these findings, and additionally demonstrated that these effects were modulated by goal prioritization. Experiment II.1 (N=48) showed that avoidance-avoidance competition installed more fear and slowed down decision-making compared to other types of competition. Experiment III.1 (N=46) showed that cues predicting a painful outcome increased pain-related fear as well as avoidance behavior, and installed competition when combined with a movement that was associated with reward. Experiment III.2 (N=42) demonstrated that although pain avoidance was prominent, a pain cue was associated with less pain-avoidance behavior than a neutral or reward cue. To address the second aim of this dissertation, patients with fibromyalgia (N=40) and healthy, matched controls (N=37) participated in a semi-structured interview mapping the presence of goal conflicts (Study IV.1). More than half of the patients reported that pain control or avoidance goals conflict with other goals, such as household activities or social activities. This dissertation provides novel experimental evidence for the inclusion of a broad motivational perspective in the Fear-Avoidance model, and may also help improve the effectiveness of existing cognitive-behavioral treatments for patients suffering from chronic pain by addressing goal competition.status: publishe