Stress and Mood

Abstract

Work and relationships have an affect on a person's over all well-being. They can cause high levels of stress and very content moods. If stress is built up over time and people are always in bad moods, a person health could be in danger. We set out to test that work situations would be more stressful and put people in a worse mood then relationships conflicts. Participants were 42 undergraduate students (33 female, 9 male) enrolled at Sacred Heart University. All participants were put in either a work or relationship scenario. They then filled out a questionnaire. The results did not support our hypotheses; the levels of stress and mood were about the same. Overall there were high levels of stress and very content moods when put in uneasy predicaments.

Stress & Mood:

Work Experience and Personal Interaction

Stress and mood are influences that affect the average college student. Relationships influence physical and mental health (Berry and Worthington, 2001), as well as an over-abundant amount of work, and trying to manage time due to role and work overload. Role theory says that inter-role conflict and tension (or stress) often results as individuals find it increasingly difficult to successfully execute each of their roles because of constrained resources (e.g. time, energy) (Bolino and Turnley, 2005). For example, after working all day and coming home to a substantial amount of homework and studying, on minimal sleep, due to staying up all night to prepare for a test early in the morning prior to work. This has a factor on the amount of stress because many things are going on. People worry about their school grades or even their jobs due to financial needs; it can be quite the buildup of stress. Since stress and mood are very important to an individual's health, there have been many studies to test how work and relationships affect a person's well being. This research has shown that role overload has as affect on stress (Bolino and Turnley.) Also that mood does "spill over" outside of work and in relationships in that the affective states experienced (e.g. fights, work) influenced mood measured later in the day (Judge and IIies, 2004).

Since relationship conflicts and breakups (divorce) are connected with bad health outcomes, Berry and Worthington (2001) came up with a study to investigate. They proved that individuals who were dissatisfied with a current relationship would have an elevated stress response and worse physical and mental health compared to participants in a happy relationship. Bolino and Turnley (2005) found that there is a personal cost (stress) associated with good initiative and taking on other roles (e.g. jobs, clubs). Another study done by (Peeters et al. 2005) wanted to see how job demands effect health. They found that there are two kinds of demands that effect your overall well-being, emotional and mental. Emotional job demands refer to the degree to which one's work puts him/her in emotionally stressful situations. Mental job demands refer to the degree in which work tasks call on a person to use constant mental effort in carrying out his or her duties (Peeters et at). As a final point, judge and IIies (2004) set up a study to investigate the influence of mood dimensions on job satisfaction, and they explored the interrelationships between moods experienced both at work and at home. Second, they examined the relationships between mood at work and mood at home, focusing on spillover effects from work to home. After testing they have shown that state mood influences state job satisfaction. They found that employee's satisfaction with their job, measures at work, influences the affective state experienced by employees at home.

All these studies were done to measure the amount of stress or different moods in work, job and relationships situations. Another way to measure these factors is present in this study. When put in a certain scenario, different moods or levels of stress will come into effect. Two hypotheses were evaluated. First, after reading the work experience scenario, it was predicated that participants would be more stressed, compared to those reading the friendship interaction scenario. Second, it was predicted that after reading the friendship interaction scenario there would be a generally more positive mood than those who read the work scenario.

Method

Participants

In this study participants were recruited by professors and teachers. They encouraged students to participate by giving them extra credit as rewards. All are undergraduate students at a moderate sized Catholic school in Northeast America that are in general psychology 1 and 2 classes. Participants signed up online and chose a study to there interest. Then they picked a 15 minutes time slot that fit best with there schedules. After all the recruiting there were a total of 42 participants; 33 female and 9 male.

Materials

In our study we spilt the 42 participants into two independent variable groups. This was done by random selecting to reduce error. Half the participants were asked to read a brief scenario on work (refer to appendix A) and the other half were asked to read a scenario on relationships (refer to appendix B & C). The work scenario was a situation in which you are experiencing work overload and trying to manage your time the best you can. You are put in a predicament in which you have to decide what is more important, work or school. The relationship scenario was about managing and dealing with a hard breakup. There were two stories for this but they were exactly the same. The only thing that was altered was the gender. Depending on the participants sex they were given scenarios that dealt with the opposite sex, all heterosexual relationships. After participants were done reading, they then were asked to fill out a brief questionnaire that consisted that consisted of 22 questions (Appendix D). Twelve of them were distracter/filler questions, and the other 10 were used in measuring the dependent variable. It was a mixture of multiple choices, and rating scale questions. All rating scale questions were used in measuring the dependent variables. These questions were on a scale of one to five. There were five questions on mood and five on stress. To measure the dependent variable all mood questions were added up together and then all the stress questions were added up.

Procedure

This