... tells us tells that heart rate increases when we encounter difficult situations, or does it? Lacey (1967) argued that in some cases, this was not necessarily true. He offered a theory (1967) that proposed that when solving problems in your head (for example mental arithmetic), heart rate would indeed increase (the more complex the problem the higher the heart rate). Lacey argues that the reason for this is because this type of task requires participants to concentrate on their mental operations and to reject irrelevant information coming from the surrounding environment. In contrast, the theory predicts the tasks that do require mental intake of environmental stimuli, for example when performing a visual search task (the more difficult the visual search the lower the heart rate) will decrease heart rate. The theory therefore suggests that there is no simple, direct relationship between heart rate at task difficulty as, depending on the ...

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