How stressed are your students?

I've been reading quite a bit lately about high school students and stress (especially students in AP and IB programs). I'm also talking with my daughter (10th grade, IB program) about stress (not very successfully) and it's making me wonder about the connections between high school psychology and student stress.

This topic "fits" most obviously in a "Health and Stress" unit, but I'm not sure how many of us teach a chapter like that? It could belong in the Motivation and Emotion unit too? Or maybe just Bio Psychology? I've talked with many high school psych teachers about how the Cognition unit can help students figure out how to study and how to "learn how to learn." I wonder if there might be similar and equally important lessons from our psychology content about how to FEEL about learning (and trying, and failing, and succeeding, and how to handle the emotional components of learning).

I don't have many great resources to share about this yet, and I'd love to hear from you all. Here's a good (I think) article from Psychology Today - might be a place to start?

A Back to School Stress-Management Toolkit for Teens

(Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/firesam/5242760927 - labelled for reuse) 



posted by Rob McEntarffer

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Stress and Music Assignment

Hi All,

A couple of you noticed that I had a regular psychology assignment embedded as an option in my Emotions/Stress Hyperdoc. I forgot I had put that in there. I believe that music can be a wonderful way to connect with students. We share and they share. Of course, we all experience stress. At the end of this assignment, I ask the students to share other songs that make the stress connection.

My regular psychology class is project-based and I wanted to show my kids that love and sex are not the only things singers croon and rap about.

So here is the link to my stress and music assignment:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aNQ1qiP76irzqrWsuTW9lCXXhEn5uCsd14xdtbsXPeE/edit?usp=sharing



posted by Chuck Schallhorn

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Psych in the news

Seriously? There is so much news flying by I'll never catch up. Today's installment is in fast forward with a minimum amount of words, no credits and crammed in every which way.

Calculating very rare events * Do psychologists still use Rorschach tests? * The mental heath of Iraqis after years of war * How ads enhance TV watching * The flexibility of dream interpretation * Does stress cause gray hair? * Older dads linked to lower IQ kids * Single sex classes in public schools * Placebos in teen depression studies * Brain differences between the religious and non-religious (and hear the NPR report) * Psychology and neuroscience on Twitter *

Two longer ones to end on: shark attacks are dropping and the economy's to blame! (Does anyone else use the correlation does not equal causation example of shark attacks and ice cream sales? So now shark attacks and the economy are correlated?)


Finally, a WARNING: this article in the Washington Post magazine on children dying in cars accidentally because they were forgotten by their parents is difficult to read (or at least it was for me -- there are parts I just had to skim through). I add it only because of the questions it raises about memory, inattention, distraction and people being off of their routines which leads to forgetting. There's also a sidebar on ways to prevent these tragedies -- sure, there's some technology, but there are also the simple things like putting something that you need for work (ID badge, briefcase, keys, etc.) in the back with the child. Kids and Cars also has other devices.

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Psych in the news

Beauty affects men's and women's brains differently. (Wired)

Researchers in Montreal report that people who were abused or neglected as children showed genetic alterations that likely made them more biologically sensitive to stress. (NY Times)

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. (NYT)

Low levels of Vitamin D may be associted with an increased risk for dementia. (NYT)

Finally some good news for your slackers: "People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate," says a researcher in a new study. (Wired)

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Psych in the news

Soldiers undergoing mock interrogations can be tricked by simple psychological techniques into misidentifying their interrogator. Combined with other research carried out by Elizabeth Loftus, psychologists are closing in on the exact procedures for creating false memories in individuals. (Wired Science)

Paul Ekman looks at old footage of Alex Rodriguez A-lying about his steroid use and finds, shockingly, a "higher probability of lying." (NY Times)

Merel Kindt and colleagues have found that by giving propanolol to people before they recalled a scary memory about a spider, they could erase the fearful response it triggered. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

Scientists are studying schadenfreude (which is one of my all-time favorite words). “We have a saying in Japanese, ‘The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey,’ ” said Hidehiko Takahashi, the first author on the report. “The ventral striatum is processing that ‘honey.’ ” Awesome! (NY Times)

Newsweek has a cover story on stress and finds that, hey, it might not be so bad!

I finally got around to listening to some of my backlog of This American Life shows -- which I could not recommend more highly, by the way -- and I thought readers might be interested in this segment. "Host Ira Glass talks to Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who designed an experiment to see what happens when a bad worker joins a team. Felps divided people into small groups and gave them a task. One member of the group would be an actor, acting either like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive. And within 45 minutes, the rest of the group started behaving like the bad apple. (13 minutes)"

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