Passage 1A new study finds that even mild stress can affect your ability to control your e

Passage 1

A new study finds that even mild stress can affect your ability to control your emotions. A team of neuroscientists at New York University say that their findings suggest that certain _1_ that teach people how to better control their emotions—such as those used to treat social anxiety and phobias— may not work as well during stressful situations. “We have long suspected that stress can _2_ our ability to control our emotions, but this is the first study to document how even mild stress can undercut therapies designed to keep our emotions in _3_ said senior author and psychology professor Elizabeth Phelps. “In other words, what you learn in the clinic may not be as _4_ in the real world when you’re stressed.” To help patients learn to _5_ their emotional impairment, therapists sometimes use cognitive restructuring techniques encouraging patients to alter their thoughts or approach to a situation to change their emotional response. These might include focusing on the positive or non-threatening aspects of an event or _6_ that might normally produce fear. To test how these techniques hold up in real-life situations, the team _7_ a group of 78 volunteers, who viewed pictures of snakes and spiders. Some of the pictures were paired with an electric shock, and participants _8_ developed a fear of these pictures. The subjects “reported more _9_ feelings of fear when viewing the pictures, compared with when they viewed images not paired with a shock. Next the participants were taught cognitive strategies, similar to those _10_ bytherapists and known as cognitive-behavioral therapy, to learn to diminish the fears brought on by the experiment.

A) check

B) regulate

C) eventually

D) consequences

E) impair

F) stimulus

G) bleak

H) enlisted

I) relevant

J) prescribed

K) therapies

L) confined