A mind-body disconnection? Discordance between thoughts about stress and cardiovascular stress responses

Stress responses are defined by mind-body interactions that engage both psychological and physiological processes. We provide foundational research investigating the mind-body connection during stress to ask: how do individuals’ thoughts about stressors align with their cardiovascular responses? 925 dyads (N = 1,850) anticipated, engaged in, and recovered from stress-inducing social-evaluative tasks. Analyses revealed that individuals’ self-reported and cardiovascular indices of stress were not significantly associated at any timepoint, bolstered by post-hoc Inclusion Bayes Factors supporting the null (vs. alternative) hypothesis. Meta-analytic results suggested the association between measures is effectively zero, indicating findings may generalize beyond a social interaction context and our primarily White, female, college-aged sample. These findings suggest individuals’ perceptions of stress may be distinct from their physiological stress responses, carry significant implications for the way we conceptualize and measure stress, and indicate that multi-method, full-body approaches are critical for a holistic understanding of the human stress response.