A Change in Perspective Could be All It Takes to Succeed in School
Knowing the right way to handle stress in the classroom and on the sports field can make the difference between success and failure for the millions of students going back to school this fall, new University of Chicago research shows.
“We found that cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress, can either be tied to a student’s poor performance on a math test or contribute to success, depending on the frame of mind of the student going into the test,” said Sian Beilock, associate professor in psychology at UChicago and one of the nation’s leading experts on poor performance by otherwise talented people.
She is the author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have To, released this month in paperback.
In a new paper published in the current issue of the journal Emotion, Beilock and her colleagues explore the topic of performance failure in math and show, for the first time, that there is a critical connection between working memory, math anxiety and salivary cortisol.
Working memory is the mental reserve that people use to process information and figure out solutions during tests. Math anxiety is fear or apprehension when just thinking about taking a math test. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal gland and associated with stress-related changes in the body; it is often referred to as the “stress hormone.” [continue reading…]
Is stress triggered by your genes or by your lifestyle? Help the BBC investigate the causes of stress, and get personalized tips for improving your mental wellbeing.
Professor Peter Kinderman, who designed the Big Stress Experiment, explains what he’s hoping to learn about the causes and consequences of stress.
Stress is not a simple condition. There is no single cause. A whole variety of factors, from our genes to our childhood experiences, affect our mental well being.
We can easily study each trigger on its own, but that probably wouldn’t give us the whole picture. It comes as no surprise that people who’ve survived childhood traumas are more likely to have problems later in life. But not everyone who’s had a difficult past will feel the same. What we don’t yet understand is how important the different causes are in relation to each other. Are events in your past more important than events in the last year – or than the way you interact with your friends and family today?
The only way we can unravel such a complex web of causes is by surveying a large number of people. And the best way to do that is by using the internet.
Is stress triggered by your genes or by your lifestyle? Help us investigate the causes of stress, and get personalised tips for improving your mental wellbeing.
Getting married, exercising regularly, thinking happy thoughts, not working so hard— according to The Longevity Project are not shortcuts to immortality, and for certain groups of people, they can actually have the opposite effect! Veronique Greenwood writes in the Atlantic about the Longevity Project which debunks conventional wisdom. that “Worrying is always bad for your health.
Optimistic people have a tendency to ignore details, meaning they don’t follow doctor’s orders correctly or lead themselves into unhealthy situations or addictions. It was the conscientious people—careful, sometimes even neurotic, but not catastrophizing—who lived longer, write Friedman and Martin, researchers at the University of California, Riverside. And, their studies show, some of what we think will benefit our children may actually rob them of years later in life. In the Terman study, precocious, active children who were sent to school a year early, as Philip was, tended to have emotional problems that led to unhealthy behaviors and shortened life span.
Knowing the right way to handle stress in the classroom and on the sports field can make the difference between success and failure for the millions of students going back to school this fall, new University of Chicago research shows.
