河南省新乡市新誉佳高级中学2015届高三英语二轮复习专题卷阅读理解（08）
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Decisionmaking under Stress
A new review based on a research shows that acute stress affects the way the brain considers the advantages and disadvantages, causing it to focus on pleasure and ignore the possible negative(负面的) consequences of a decision.
The research suggests that stress may change the way people make choices in predictable ways.
“Stress affects how people learn，” says Professor Mara Mather.“People learn better about positive than negative outcomes under stress.”
For example, two recent studies looked at how people learned to connect images(影像)with either rewards or punishments. In one experiment, some of the participants were first stressed by having to give a speech and do difficult math problems in front of an audience; in the other, some were stressed by having to keep their hands in ice water. In both cases, the stressed participants remembered the rewarded material more accurately and the punished material less accurately than those who hadn't gone through the stress.
This phenomenon is likely not surprising to anyone who has tried to resist eating cookies or smoking a cigarette while under stress—at those moments, only the pleasure associated with such activities comes to
