Money worries can enhance performance on some kinds of mental test

Poverty erects material barriers, but psychological ones too, from the conditions that exacerbate mental health problems, to inculcating children with the sense that they are second-rate. A stream of recent research has suggested that financial concerns can also tax your mind and prevent you from thinking clearly. But that may be too sweeping a conclusion, according to Junhua Dang of Lund University and his colleagues in Sweden and China. Their study, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, suggests having money problems on the mind doesn’t always impair cognitive ability. In fact, it can even enhance it.The prior studies had shown worse performance on intelligence tests by poorer participants when they were asked to think about financial issues beforehand, because of how these issues loaded their “working memory” – their ability to hold and process information over short time periods – thus hindering the mental manipulations the tests required. But working memory isn’t key to all cognitive work, so Dang’s team set out to see if other kinds of mental tasks would be unaffected by monetary angst.The participants performed a categorisation task, some of them after being prompted to think about their financial woes. They then viewed a series of basic but rich images – a shape that could be square or circle, yellow or blue, and contained one or two symbols coloured red or green – and attempted to sort each one into the correct category A or B. There ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Source Type: blogs