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Record W4409907626 · doi:10.1016/j.concog.2025.103872

Preliminary evidence for a selective agency-boosting effect of psychosocial stress

2025· article· en· W4409907626 on OpenAlexaff
S. Gareth Edwards, Carl Michael Galang, K. K. Fung, Sukhvinder S. Obhi

Bibliographic record

VenueConsciousness and Cognition · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicPsychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
Canadian institutionsMcMaster University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPsychologyBoosting (machine learning)Agency (philosophy)PsychosocialCognitive psychologyClinical psychologyStress (linguistics)Developmental psychologyPsychotherapistArtificial intelligenceEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

• Across 2 studies, explicit and implicit methods are used to explore stress and SoA. • Under stress, temporal binding selectively increases after 700 ms delays. • No statistically significant relationship was found between stress and explicit SoA. • Increased action-effect intervals produce a potential “stress-enabled agency boost” Sense of Agency (SoA) arises from the perception of being in control of one’s own actions and their outcomes. Many contextual and individual difference variables have been found to influence the SoA. Here, we focused on elucidating the potential relationship between psychosocial stress and the SoA across two studies. Psychosocial stress was induced via the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and agency was assessed in a task involving production of a voluntary action that resulted in an auditory effect 100 ms, 400 ms or 700 ms later. In Study 1, we used an explicit self-reported measure of agency in the form of a perception of control rating, and in Study 2 we used an implicit measure of agency in the form of temporal estimates of the interval between an action and an effect, so called intentional binding (IB). The results of Study 1 (explicit) showed that undergoing the TSST relative to a control condition increased SoA for outcomes that occur after a 700 ms delay. However, this effect was weak and did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. In Study 2 (IB), temporal estimates in the stress condition were significantly shorter than those in the control condition, exclusively for action-effect time delays of 700 ms. We conclude that this increased IB for 700 ms delays after induction of psychosocial stress reflects a potential “stress-enabled agency boost”, and that such an agency boost might be associated with the fight-or-flight stress response. Directions for future research are suggested.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.029

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.073
GPT teacher head0.343
Teacher spread0.270 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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