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What the word “not” may
reveal about your ability to handle stress
New research by Friedrich-Alexander University’s
Oliver Schultheiss and his coauthors Kathrin Riebel and Nicolette
Jones indicates that the negation “not” reveals a
lot about people’s ability to cope with stress. According
to a paper that will be published in the journal Neuropsychology,
the frequency with which people use “not” in written
language – considered to be a measure of the disposition
to inhibit activity – predicts how strongly the right hemisphere
becomes engaged in stimulus processing during stress. And this
may explain some consequences of high activity inhibition.
In four studies, Schultheiss and colleagues
first measured research participants’ level of activity
inhibition by counting the frequency of the word “not”
in imaginative stories. Afterwards, they tested the participants
for whether their left or their right brain hemisphere was faster
at detecting little dots presented on the computer screen. In
all studies, participants with high levels of activity inhibition
were faster at responding to stimuli presented to the right hemisphere
than they were to dots presented to the left hemisphere. This
difference between the hemispheres was particularly striking in
participants who were either in a bad mood when they came to the
experiment or who were put into a bad mood by what they encountered
during the experiment (e.g., angry faces or defeat in a competition
against another participant). Participants low in activity inhibition,
on the other hand, did not show this hemispheric difference in
response to dot stimuli. In some, the effect was even reversed:
when stressed, they were faster at detecting dots presented to
their left hemisphere than dots presented to their right hemisphere.
“This finally provides an explanation
for earlier findings reported for activity inhibition,”
says Oliver Schultheiss, who heads the Human Motivation and Affective
Neuroscience Laboratory at Friedrich-Alexander University. “People
who use the word ‘not’ a lot have been found to be
more expressive nonverbally, to have stronger physiological responses
to stress, and to act more flexibly and resourcefully when they
face challenges. These are all functions of the right hemisphere.”
However, the greater physiological responses
to stress may also put people high in activity inhibition at a
greater risk for disease. As past research shows, individuals
high in activity inhibition are more likely to become severely
ill in response to stress. They are also more prone to suffer
from cardiovascular disease. Low activity inhibition, on the other
hand, may be a protective factor in the context of stress. As
Schultheiss and his collaborators speculate in their new paper,
the left-hemispheric shift observed in stressed individuals who
use the word “not” only sparingly in their verbal
utterances may recruit the growth- and repair-related functions
of the left hemisphere. This in turn may provide a buffer against
the corrosive effects of stress on the immune system and the body.
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