When we’re stressed out, sometimes we feel the need to reward ourselves more than we normally would, maybe with a candy bar or a bag of greasy, delicious potato chips. But even though it seems like we enjoy those things more during times that we are freaking out about something, new research shows that’s not the case.
A new study from University of Geneva published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition suggests that while stress can cause us to work really hard for those kinds of rewards, “reward pursuit is not always proportional to the pleasure experienced,” the authors wrote.
The Washington Post explain how things played out:
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The study involved a somewhat small group of participants: 36 self-proclaimed chocolate loving college students. To produce feelings of stress, 18 of the students put their hands into ice-cold water, while the others did so with lukewarm water. Researchers measured the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the participants’ saliva before and after sticking their hands into the water.
After a 10-minute break, the students had the chance to smell chocolate by pressing a handgrip when cued by a visual prompt. The stressed-out group exerted nearly three times more effort to smell chocolate than the chilled-out participants.
It turns out that the stressed and non-stressed students didn’t really feel any different about the experience when asked to evaluate how pleasant, familiar and edible the chocolate smell was.
“Our results also showed that, although participants mobilized more effort to smell the chocolate odor when under stress, they did not report the odor as being more pleasurable,” authors the write.
The authors did acknowledge that these results don’t really provide a comprehensive understanding of how this relates to stress affecting more extreme behaviors addictions.
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“Stress plays a critical role in many psychological disorders and is one of the most important factors determining relapses in addiction, gambling and binge eating, ” study co-author Tobias Brosch said in a statement. “Stress seems to flip a switch in our functioning: If a stressed person encounters an image or a sound associated with a pleasant object, this may drive them to invest an inordinate amount of effort to obtain it.”
