Prospects for the Use of Psychophysiological Methods to Assess Stress Resistance in a Situation of Professional Psychological Selection

Abstract

The study is aimed at developing the problem of increasing the reliability and objectivity of professional selection. Psychodiagnostic methods used in professional selection have a common drawback: their result is quite easy to falsify. The purpose of the study is to explore the possibilities of psychophysiological methods in solving problems of psychological diagnostics. Hypothesis: the intensity of emotional and physiological reactions to stressful stimuli is positively related to the level of neuroticism and negatively to the stress resistance of the participants in the experiment. The sample consisted of students in the amount of 16 people (11 girls) aged 17 to 21 years. A modified Eysenck personality questionnaire and a test by Cohen and Willianson were used. The experiment consisted in presenting stressful video material to the participants and simultaneously fixing their mimic and physiological reactions. It was found that the intensity of the manifestation of the emotion of sadness is positively associated with low stress tolerance, and the severity of the emotion of happy is positively associated with the level of neuroticism (p<0.05). The revealed effects are both of applied importance in the context of professional selection, and are of independent theoretical interest.