Knowing something bad is coming is more bearable than uncertainty

People like to know what’s coming for them, even if it’s bad, a new study suggests. A small study published Tuesday found that people are more stressed out when there is the possibility they will experience discomfort as opposed to when they knew for sure something bad is coming.
In the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, people were shown a bunch of rocks and were asked to guess whether a snake was underneath them. When a snake was under the rock, the men and women received an electric shock on the back of their hand. The researchers measured how stressed the individuals felt and looked at physical markers of stress like pupil dilation and sweat. They found that most of the men and women felt more stressed when they were uncertain, compared to when they knew definitively the shock was coming./.../