Although the appraisal of a situation as challenging has positive effects on performance and stress-related outcomes, the situational and individual characteristics that make challenge appraisal likely are far from clear. The purpose of this paper is to test these characteristics based on a review of the conceptualizations of challenge and the associated positive effects.,Potential characteristics of challenge are tested in two policy-capturing studies using a full factorial experimental design.,Results reveal that situations are appraised as more challenging than threatening when goal importance, task difficulty and controllability are high rather than low.,These results indicate that challenge and threat are distinguished through the means a person believes to have available to cope with demands, an aspect of controllability.,This paper provides a first experimental test of characteristics of challenging situations.

中文翻译：

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挑战性形势的特征：两项政策捕获研究

尽管对具有挑战性的情况的评估会对绩效和与压力相关的结果产生积极影响，但使挑战评估可能的情况和个人特征尚不清楚。本文的目的是在对挑战的概念化和相关的积极影响进行综述的基础上测试这些特征。在两个采用全因子实验设计的政策捕获研究中，对挑战的潜在特征进行了测试。结果揭示了这种情况当目标重要性，任务难度和可控制性高而不是低时，被认为比威胁更具挑战性。这些结果表明，挑战和威胁是通过人们认为可以用来应付需求的手段（即可控性的一个方面）来区分的。 ，