133F Midterm 2 Weeks 4-7

reappraising stress

Jamieson (2016), Peters, Greenwood, Altose

Jamieson (2016)

Reappraising stress arousal improves performance and reduces evaluation anxiety in classroom exam situations

Its possible to impact a students level of math anxiety

with a brief reading on the adaptive functions of stress

the stress arousal reappraisal intervention the authors used worked. What did it do?

reappraisal intervention suggested that signs of stress can be seen as coping tools

Jamieson 2016 what else did the authors find?

Students in the intervention group improved their performance from the first to the second exam

students in the intervention group perceived themselves to have increased levels of coping resources

an increase in perceived coping resources was positively correlated with exam performance

Why are exams sometimes stressful?

• exams affect grades and we think grades matter (thats just a fact)

• performance is under times pressure because exams have a time limit

• its a potential to be evaluated by others based on how we do

• it's a potential for us to self evaluate because we are confronted with our own performance

Common physiological and physical measures related to stress used by researchers and perhaps us (not part of the reading)

• voice crack

• heart rate increase

• palms sweating

• bodily changes we feel

• eye behavior changes

• head movement

• pupil size changes

• body temp changes

Bodily Changes + Knowledge of the situation -appraisal-> STRESS

• there are physiological/bodily changes we feel can be associated with stress and tend to associate with stress

• when those bodily changes happen in the context of a situation like an exam or an impending exam, we put those things together and APPRAISE it as stress

• weren't trying to change arousal levels, just trying to change what people thought about the arousal they were already experiencing

• if you can change the appraisal you might be able to change the feeling that follows from it

what we know from prior research: what do we know about feelings of threat?

• when you feel threatened, it leads to feeling negative affect

• that negative affect may come in forms of stress, shame, anxiety

• that negative affect has been shown in research to be a causal factor for worse performance

• if you feel worse that can be correlated to performing worse after which we know from prior research

object of jamieson 2016 study

• to look at where the whole thing starts with the feeling of threat

• looking to see if we can change that feeling of threat and change the negative things that happens downstream from the feeling of threat

• tackling the beginning part the threat part

in a demanding situation, two important factors at play

1) how demanding you think the situation is/how you perceive situational demands

2) your coping resources being high/ how you perceive your own coping resources

• if you as a college student took spelling test that would be normally administered in 5th grade you wouldnt feel like it's that much of a demanding situation

• your perception of the situational demands would be low because your coping resources would be high because your knowledge is high

• you have more coping resources aka more resources to tackle these demands

of situational demands and coping resources what is important?

The one you think had the greatest weight matters

• of those two things, the thing that is stronger that outweighs the other in that pairing is really important

• which is more present the feeling of a situational demands or the feeling of coping resources.

• we can think of those on a balanced scale

• the ELEMENTS on the scale are the same, they are just tipped in opposite directions

feeling of threat

when your perceived situational demands outweighs the perception of coping resources

feeling of challenge

when your perception of coping resources outweighs your perceived situational demands

if you want to change the balance what would you change?

• decrease your demands

• increase your coping resources

• increase your PERCEPTIONS of your coping resources

• they thought if they could change people’s perceptions of their coping resources, then the coping resources would outweigh the situational demands and they would feel a feeling of challenge rather than threat

stress reappraisal interventions

• when the sense of arousal (sweating, increased heart rate, quickened breathing) is presented during a demanding situation as ADAPTIVE, functional coping resources that aid performance can serve as an intervention

• potential signs of arousal and stress are presented as being a coping resource

  • ex: you run to your exam

  • you have increased heart rate

  • you feel that because of that increased heart rate you are so nervous for the exam

  • instead you can rethink about the arousal as you have increased heart rate meaning you have more blood flow and more oxygen is getting pumped to your brain and is going to allow me to think more clearly during the exam

  • all that heart racing being good for me would be a reappraisal

Bodily Changes + Knowledge of the situation -appraisal-> IM READY

trying to change the reappraisal from feeling “stressed” to “im ready” “im prepared”

(at least that is theoretically what the intent was)

what doesnt the stress reappraisal interventions try to do?

the stress reappraisal interventions do not try to reduce stress arousal

• the intervention weren’t about “dont worry”, “it’s no big deal”, “just ignore it” that’s not the intervention that they did (it’s actually what the control they did)

Hypothesis of the current study (reappraisal intervention)

• they thought that getting students to do the reappraisal intervention/to repparaise the causes of their stress arousal would

  • increase appraisals of coping resources

  • reduce math anxiety

  • improve exam performance

• They thought those increases in performance would be related to the resource reappraisal

• A change in resource appraisal (if you increased your appraisal of available resources) would be a predictor for performance improvement

Hypothesis of Jamieson 2016

• n=93 developmental math students

• it was a field experiment

• community college in Ohio

  • used to be the case that in community college you took a math placement test + high school grades determined what math class you needed to be placed in and you may have been placed in a developmental math class before you can take the college level math class but this is not longer implemented

• got students from 5 different classes all with the same instructor, using the same materials

• they did random assignment within each classroom

  • even though each class had the same instructor which is really nice for consistency, they did not want to favor one class over the other so they randomly assigned treatment or control within each of the classrooms as to not bias the results

  • someone really academically inclined could choose to take an 8 am class and as to not create a bias between class periods each period has control and treatment groups

Procedure of Jamieson 2016

• there were two exams

Day of Exam 1

• before the first exam they got kinda a baseline measure

• before exam 1 they got a measure of math anxiety and stress appraisals and then they didn’t do anything

• that way we know what you’d be like without an intervention

Day of Exam 2

• for exam two on the day of the exam they were randomly assigned to conditions of either treatment/intervention or control

• they ran a double blind experiment so students didn’t know what condition they were in and the instructor didn’t what condition any one person was in

• they constructed the intervention such that it was delivery of paper and everyone got it (intervention in writing, same cover page)

  • the instructor knew what the experiment was about but didn’t know wny version any particular person got

Intervention Group Materials: : Let’s consider what the intervention was

for the intervention, what the students got before their exam in a packet of paper was

• a summary of some real scientific articles

• the summaries were followed up by two questions

  • the first question was on the content of what they read to ensure they actually read (if they dont actually read like they were asked they get thrown out of the experiment)

  • the second question encourages them to endorse a message of what they had read from the content of the summaries of those research articles

• This took only about 5-8 minutes of reading some summaries of articels and answering two questions

Content of the Intervention

Content in the intervention group had to do with the adaptive function of stress, how stress can be a good thing

• they got the message that increased arousal during test is not harmful

• stress evolved to help us address acute demands

• increased arousal actually aids demands

• Basically all messages that would encourage them to reappraise their interpretation of their bodily functions

• not trying to push them aside but just acknowledging if you’ve got some stress this is how you can interpret that, its not harmful, it was evolutionarily developed to be good for you

• and it aids perfomance