Boldness moderates cognitive performance under acute threat: Evidence from a task-switching paradigm involving cueing...

Understanding factors that influence behavioral performance in high-pressure contexts is relevant to critical occupations such as first responders, military personnel, and frontline medical workers. A recent study by Yancey et al. (2019) demonstrated an association between boldness, a biobehavioral trait reflecting social dominance and fearlessness, and enhanced task-switching performance during threat of shock relative to a no-shock (safe) condition. This study used a sustained threat manipulation in which cues signaling possible shock were present throughout blocks of multiple task trials. Here, we extended this work by evaluating the relationship between boldness and task-switching performance under acute threat of shock conditions, in which cues signaling possible shock occurred during individual task trials, intermingled with safe trials. Participants (N = 79) completed a task-switching procedure involving acute threat of shock in which unwarned noise probes were presented to elicit blink-startle responses. Boldness was associated with better switching performance under threat versus safe conditions, with high-bold participants who exhibited low startle potentiation during threat showing the best performance. These findings provide additional evidence that dispositional boldness is a meaningful individual difference characteristic related to effective performance in high-pressure situations and have implications for personnel selection and assignment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).