A
recent series of print advertisements aimed at
reducing on-the-job accidents caused controversy
in Windsor when the organization that governs the
city’s public transit system decided they were too
graphic for commuters. People waiting for a bus did not need the
anxiety of seeing someone lying in a pool of blood, declared the
transport committee.
However, the effect of such ads – which were placed by the
Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and depicted a series of
sometimes gruesome workplace accidents – are what intrigue
University of Windsor Psychology Associate Professor Fuschia
Sirois. With her team of students, Dr. Sirois operates a Health
and Well-Being Lab in UWindsor’s Chrysler Hall. The lab is
used primarily for measuring the physiological reactions people
experience when they are subjected to anxiety-inducing stress. The
equipment they employ includes galvanic skin response finger clips,
as well as devices that monitor cardio-respiratory status. “Rather
than just asking someone about how anxious or stressed they are,”
she says, “we can take the actual physiological measures.”
One of the group’s studies involves surveying people who are
making healthy lifestyle changes and monitoring their progress to
determine, among other things, what sorts of mental strategies they
use when they delay acting on their commitments. Procrastination
is one of Sirois’ major fields of interest and she has published
numerous articles on the subject.
“We know that people who put things off engage in thought
processes to minimize that stress,” she says. “What happens in that
thought process? What is it that they tell themselves to make it okay?”
Health-seeking behaviour is another Sirois focus. She plans
to conduct a study that would involve drafting drama students to
develop mock enactments of announcements about certain diseases
and conditions that would vary in their level of alarm. The subjects
in her lab would be exposed to the enactments, with the aim of
determining how anxiety can be used effectively to motivate people
into health-promoting behaviour, without causing a sense of
near-mental paralysis.
“To what level do you have to raise people’s anxiety to get
them to seek help for a symptom, but without alarming them?”
Sirois asks rhetorically.
People may intuitively know that they need to see a doctor if
they’re experiencing light-headedness or shortness of breath, but
may put off going if they know that the consequence might be
discovering they have life-threatening heart disease.
Sirois has reviewed the existing literature on the subject and has
found that, at low levels of anxiety, people do not tend to look for help
or treatment, though they become much more active attention-seekers,
“At what point is (anxiety) a threat?” says Sirois. “There are cases
in the literature where people have had full-blown heart attacks and
haven’t even gone to see a doctor. People can go undiagnosed for
years and go through a lot of suffering. A wide variety of things can
happen to people without them ever doing anything about it.”
The ultimate aim of Sirois’ research, she says, is to convince
people to get the care they need.
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v
Stressed Out!
By Stephen Fields
Measuring our anxiety and promoting positive responses
view . summer 2008
5
Opposite: Psychology Associate Professor Fuschia Sirois (Kevin Kavanaugh Photo)
