What Happens When You Are Waiting For News?

I still remember the wait to find out whether I had gotten into the college of my choice.  I applied early and was told that letters would be mailed out on December 15.  That period was filled with occasional bouts of stress and a lot of thoughts about whether I would get in.  The last few days were particularly difficult as I waited for the mail to come.  On the day that the letter finally arrived, I put it down on the kitchen table and did a few chores around the house before finally sitting down and opening it. 

That kind of waiting experience is common.  Admissions decisions, medical test results, job applications.  All of these have some period of time where you have to wait to get news, but there is little or nothing you can do to affect the outcome of the decision.

An interesting paper by Kate Sweeny and Sara Andrews in the June, 2014 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examines how these kinds of waiting periods unfold.

They studied 50 people who took the California Bar exam.  There is a 4-month waiting period between taking the exam and getting the test score.  Succeeding on this exam is crucial for people who want to practice law.

Participants took a series of personality measures prior to taking the exam.  Then, the researchers took measures of anxiety and various strategies people use to deal with anxiety at four points in the process:  a day after taking the exam, 6 weeks after taking it, 12 weeks after taking it, and within a day of getting the score.

As you might expect, people were very anxious a day after taking the exam.  That anxiety went down a bit at the 6-week mark and then began to creep back up.  People were quite anxious a day before getting the scores.  One of the behaviors that went along with anxiety was rumination, which is the tendency to think repeatedly about the source of the anxiety and to worry about the outcome.  The more anxiety people experienced, the more they tended to ruminate.

A set of personality characteristics was associated with lower levels of anxiety.  People who have a general tolerance for uncertainty were less anxious (particularly early on) than those with an intolerance for uncertainty.  Though, as the date for getting the test score approached, everyone got nervous.  This tolerance for uncertainty is related to another characteristic called Need for Closure, which reflects how much people like to be done with things.  The higher people’s need for closure, the more they were anxious about waiting (particularly early in the waiting period).

Two other personality characteristics were also important:  defensive pessimism and dispositional optimism.  Defensive pessimism is a person’s tendency to assume the worst outcome when waiting.  Dispositional optimism is a person’s tendency to assume things will work out well in the end.  When people are highly optimistic and low in defensive pessimism, they tend to ruminate much less than when they are low in optimism and high in defensive pessimism. 

The researchers created a composite of these four characteristics, because they tended to be similar within a person.  That is, people who were tolerant of uncertainty were also generally low in need for closure, high in optimism and low in defensive pessimism. 

A high value on this composite was generally related to healthier approaches to waiting than a low value on this composite.  For example, people with a high composite personality score spent less time bracing themselves for bad news than people with a low composite.  They also spent more time trying to be optimistic and had high levels of hope that the outcome would go well.  People tried to distance themselves from the outcome as well.  This worked for some people early on, but as the actual date of getting the test score got closer, it got harder for people to distance themselves.

What does all of this mean?

First of all, it is worth getting to know yourself a bit to understand how you deal with waiting for news.  The more tolerant you are of uncertainty, the lower your need for closure (that is, the less you need things to be complete), the more optimistic and less pessimistic your outlook, the better you cope with waiting for news.

If you happen to be someone who finds waiting particularly difficult, then, what can you do? 

Purely from the standpoint of dealing with anxiety, it is useful to help yourself stop ruminating about the outcome and to avoid spending time preparing yourself for the worst.  Those behaviors are associated with a high level of anxiety.

If you find it hard to stop thinking about the outcome, then it is helpful to find ways to think about other things.  After all, you can’t affect the outcome while you are waiting, so you should not spend too much time worrying about it.  Instead, think about other things.  Focus on other aspects of your life.  Exercise, play a musical instrument, go out with friends.  Do things that are unrelated to the news you are waiting for.

All that said, when the time for getting the news is very close, it is hard to avoid thinking about it.  At that point, you might want to spend at least a little time planning for what you will do if things do not go your way.  It can be helpful to have at least the outline of a plan for what will happen if you get bad news.  But, there is no point in starting that planning process too early.

Distractions Make You Lose Your Place

We live in a world of distraction.  When you sit at your computer trying to write or work, there is a real danger that you will get interrupted by an email, instant message, text message, or phone call.  Even if you do your best to skip past the distractions, there still may be a moment where you have to decide whether to answer the phone or check your email.

What influence do those small interruptions have on your ability to perform complex tasks?

This question was addressed in a clever set of studies by Erik Altmann, Greg Trafton, and David Hambrick in a paper in the February, 2014 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 

To explore this question, the researchers had to develop a complex task that would allow them to observe errors.  In this task, participants saw a computer screen with a box in the center.  On each trial, there was a number and a letter.  One of the characters was inside the box, and one was outside.  One character was either in italics or had an underline.  One character was either red or yellow.  The character outside the box was either above it or below it. 

The task required participants to perform a sequence of different judgments in a sequence.  To help participants remember the sequence, the order of the tasks could be remembered by using the word UNRAVEL.  For example, the first task (U) asked whether a character was underlined or in italics.  On the next trial, participants did the N task (is the letter near or far from the front of the alphabet).  Following that, they did the R task (is the colored character red or yellow).  Then A (is the character above or below the box), V (is the letter a vowel or a consonant), E (is the digit even or odd) and then L (is the digit more or less than 5).  After doing the L task, the sequence returned to U.

To respond to a particular task, participants typed the first letter of the response on a computer keyboard.  So, in the U task, they typed a U for underlined or an I for italics. 

There are two interesting aspects to this task.  First, the sequence is complicated.  Second, the individual tasks differ in how hard they are to perform.  Deciding whether a character is above or below the box is easier than figuring out whether the letter is near or far from the start of the alphabet.

To look at interruptions, there was a second task that happened periodically.  A box would appear on the screen with a code on it.  The code was a few letters or numbers.  They had to type the letters or numbers into the box to continue the task.  Some participants got 4-character codes, while others got 2-character codes.  That means that the interruptions were either about 4-seconds long or about 2-seconds long.  These interruptions happened randomly about every 6 trials.

How did the interruptions affect performance of the task?

These brief interruptions influenced people’s ability to remember where they were in the sequence.  People who got long interruptions (having to type 4 characters) were about three times more likely to make an error on the trial following the interruption than on trials with no interruption.  People who got short interruptions (having to type 2 characters) were about twice as likely to make an error on the trial following the interruption than on trials with no interruption.

The errors caused by the disruptions were sequence errors.  Basically, the interruptions caused people to lose their place in the sequence.  Most often, they mistakenly did the task they had just did or did the one following the one they were supposed to do in the sequence. 

The results related to the difficulty of the tasks were also interesting.  As I mentioned, some of the tasks were easier than others.  This ease was reflected in the likelihood people would make an error on that task.  For example, people made more errors on the near vs. far from the start of the alphabet task than on the underlined vs. italics task.  But, the effect of interruptions was the same for easy and hard tasks. 

Putting this all together, then, even very short interruptions are particularly bad when people are performing tasks that require a sequence of steps.  The interruption disrupts people’s ability to remember where they are in the sequence, and so they are likely to carry out the wrong step following an interruption. 

Just one more reason to try to keep your work environment free of even tiny distractions.