Stress Can Make You Pay More Attention: How Losing Control Boosts Engagement

Stress is usually cast as the villain of modern life, a force that scatters attention, degrades memory, and pushes people toward impulsive decisions. But a new series of experiments published in Current Psychology suggests that one of its least appreciated effects may run in the opposite direction. According to the research, stress can actually increase consumer engagement, making people more willing to look at advertisements, more likely to spend time examining them, and better at tasks requiring sustained attention to products. The key, the authors argue, lies not in stress itself but in one of its psychological components: the feeling of having little control over a situation.

The study, conducted by Aekyoung Kim of Jeonbuk University, Juliano Laran of Schema Behavioral Science, Omar Bastaki of the United Arab Emirates University, and Kristina M. Durante of Rutgers Business School, builds on a long tradition in psychology that treats stress as a multidimensional experience. Rather than asking simply whether stress is good or bad for consumers, the researchers isolated the perception of low control, the sense that events are unfolding beyond one’s influence. This component, they hypothesized, triggers a compensatory process: when people feel their control slipping, they seek out opportunities to reassert it, and the marketplace offers one surprisingly effective arena for doing so.

The theoretical foundation for this idea comes from decades of work on compensatory control. Classic research has shown that when people feel deprived of control, they respond in predictable ways: they perceive illusory patterns in random noise, gravitate toward hierarchical social structures, and even develop superstitious brand preferences. What the new research adds is a novel pathway for control restoration. Instead of reaching for structure in the environment, people may increase their engagement with it, processing information more deeply, attending more carefully, and investing more cognitive effort precisely because doing so feels like taking charge.

Across multiple studies, participants exposed to stress-inducing situations showed heightened engagement in several distinct domains. They were more willing to view advertisements, they spent more time examining the ads they did see, and they performed better on product attention tasks. These are not trivial outcomes for anyone who studies advertising. Engagement is widely regarded as a gateway variable in marketing: it predicts how well messages are encoded, how memorable brands become, and how persuasive content ultimately is. A state that reliably increases engagement therefore has consequences that ripple through the entire chain of consumer response.

The mechanism matters as much as the effect. The researchers found that the boost in engagement emerged specifically as a means of restoring a sense of control. In other words, stressed participants were not simply more aroused or more alert in a generic way; their heightened attention functioned as a control-restoration strategy. This distinction was confirmed by the boundary conditions of the effect, which are among the most technically interesting parts of the findings.

Two conditions weakened or eliminated the positive effect of stress on engagement. The first was direct address: when people could deal with the stressor itself, they no longer needed engagement as a compensatory tool, and the boost disappeared. If the source of the stress can be handled head-on, attention need not be redirected toward the marketplace as a substitute arena for control. The second condition was futility: when people believed that their control-restoration efforts would fail, the effect also weakened. Engagement, it seems, is not a reflexive response to low control but a motivated one, contingent on the expectation that investing effort can actually accomplish something.

This pattern aligns with a broader literature on stress and cognition that has often emphasized the negative side of the ledger. Acute stressors reliably elevate cortisol, and stress-level cortisol has been shown to enhance memory for emotional material while impairing delayed recall. Stress and time pressure degrade judgment and decision making, and cognitive load manipulations reduce consumers’ ability to perceive product value. Against this backdrop, the new findings do not contradict the stress-as-impairment view so much as complicate it. Stress is not a single lever; it is a bundle of components, and different components pull behavior in different directions. By decomposing stress and isolating the low-control element, the researchers demonstrate that the same physiological state that impairs some cognitive functions can sharpen others.

The work also connects to prior research by some of the same authors on how stress shapes consumer saving and spending, and to a growing body of evidence that low control drives preferences for high-effort products and services. Taken together, these findings sketch a coherent picture: control deprivation motivates effortful behavior across the consumer landscape, from choosing effortful products to engaging deeply with marketing messages. Engagement, in this framing, becomes a novel and previously underappreciated route through which people attempt to restore their sense of agency.

The practical implications are considerable, and the authors are candid about them. Marketers who understand that stress-induced engagement exists can strategically time and design their communications. Advertising encountered during stressful periods, a delayed flight, a tense news cycle, a demanding workday, may receive more attention than the same advertising encountered in calm conditions, provided the consumer cannot directly resolve the stressor and believes engagement is worthwhile. Public health communicators could exploit the same dynamics, since messages that demand attention, such as responsible drinking campaigns, may land harder with stressed audiences. At the same time, the boundary conditions serve as a caution: engagement gains evaporate when people can address the stressor or expect their efforts to be futile, so timing and framing are not optional details but essential design parameters.

There is also a consumer-protection reading of the research. If stress reliably increases engagement with commercial content, then periods of high stress are precisely when people are most cognitively available to marketers, a fact that raises questions about targeting practices during crises, elections, and economic downturns. The authors note that their findings contribute to the literature on stress, engagement, and personal control by showing that stress can have a positive effect on behavior, and by identifying increased engagement as a new way to restore control. Whether that restored control benefits the consumer, the marketer, or both depends on what is being engaged with. What the research makes clear is that the relationship between stress and attention is not a simple story of overload and distraction. Under the right conditions, the feeling of losing control sends people searching for it, and the screen in front of them is one of the places they look.

Subject of Research: The role of perceived low control in stress-induced increases in consumer engagement

Article Title: An examination of the role of stress in increasing engagement

Article References: Kim, A., Laran, J., Bastaki, O., & Durante, K. M. (2026). An examination of the role of stress in increasing engagement. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1501. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10061-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10061-4

Keywords: stress, consumer engagement, perceived control, advertising attention, compensatory control, cortisol, consumer behavior, marketing psychology, control restoration, cognitive effort, Current Psychology, boundary conditions