Social Context Buffers The Activating Effects of Caffeine on State Hostility (2016)

Undergraduates: Zachary Tucker, Michael Christian, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Kenan-Flagler Business School

Faculty Advisor: Kristen Lindquist
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Caffeine is often used as an energy booster in the workplace. Although caffeine increases activation and energy (Welsh et al., 2014), it may also have deleterious effects. I argue that caffeine use may lead to state hostility in the workplace. Specifically, I integrate aspects of psychological constructionist theories of emotion and social information-processing theories to argue that the social context moderates the effect of caffeine on activation such that when social context is positive, activation is low, while activation is high when social context is negative. In a field study of 171 nurses from a major medical center in the Southwestern United States, employees reported whether they perceived the work environment as positive or negative at the end of a 12-hour shift. Additionally, they reported the number of caffeinated beverages they had consumed that day and completed measures of activation and state hostility. Preliminary analyses suggest that caffeine leads to high levels of activation (and experiences of state hostility, in turn) when the social context is negative than when it is positive. These findings suggest that social context acts to buffer the effects of caffeine on activation and state hostility in the workplace.