On any morning in a big city you’ll see streams of people clutching their big take away cups of coffee headed off to the office. But despite the fashionability of the grande latte – do big jolts of coffee help people work?
Yes for women working in pairs, says a new British study. But for men working in pairs the effect may be negative.
The researchers including Dr Lindsay St Claire from Bristol University divided 64 people into pairs – matched by sex and age. They challenged them with memory tests, puzzles, and negotiating jobs. And researchers told them they’d have to make public presentations of their results, to increase the pressure. They were all given decaffeinated coffee to drink, but half had caffeine added.
Men and women have different ways of coping with stress – men adopt ‘fight or flight’, while women go for the ‘tend or befriend’ response. And although Dr St Clairee says the study wasn’t set up to examine sex differences – it turned out that women drinking caffeinated coffee were much faster at their tasks than those on the decaf. The pairs of men on caffeine were slower at the jobs than those who weren’t. The researchers even found that men drinking full strength coffee were ‘greatly impaired’ when doing memory tasks.
"The message is to beware mindlessly consuming extra caffeine at meetings – or under other circumstances – where group decisions & collaborations are important," says Dr St Claire.
More information: Interactive Effects of Caffeine Consumption and Stressful Circumstances on Components of Stress: Caffeine Makes Men Less, But Women More Effective as Partners Under Stress, Lindsay St. Claire, Robert C. Hayward, Peter J. Rogers, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Article first published online: 16 DEC 2010, DOI:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00693.x
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