Nora Katona

The development of school-aged children is influenced to a great extent by the level of stress they encounter during the learning process and the extent to which they feel it to be manageable. Permanent high levels of stress induce negative emotions which hinder and lower academic achievement. One of the major elements of an affective curriculum is to teach students how to handle stress and counteract negative emotions. The Student Stress Inventory of Dobson and Metcalfe (1983) was administered to 422 adolescents. The factor analysis of the Hungarian results yielded 7 factors. Adolescents who are one to two years away from finishing the given level of schooling show the highest level of stress. Differences as a function of gender emerge when factor scores are compared. Girls show a higher level of stress in factors regarding comprehension difficulties, choice of career and confrontation.Possible interventions are outlined: identifying irrational beliefs, questioning them and replacing them with positive thoughts enhancing self-esteem. Enhancing self-esteem in girls is especially important, as they tend to react with self-depreciating attributions, while boys tend to criticize the instructional environment. As a result of transforming beliefs and shaping self-esteem students’ abilities to solve conflicts in an assertive fashion and form positive long-term goals for their life-style is enhanced.

After World War II psychology as a science was banned from the Hungarian universities. It made its comeback in the early 1960s, and then mainly experimental psychology was taught. In the early 1980s the medical model of psychological services come to the forefront. Although it was very helpful in furthering psychological culture in its own time, the medical model of services became an obstacle in the way of promoting newer, social psychological and ecological viewpoints and putting them to use. The demand to modernize education makes it timely to deal with the question of school psychology. Society expects that as a result of improvements in the quality of work in educational institutions, the cultural disparity stemming from sociocultural disadvantages will be reduced. Moreover, it seems important, as well, to consider the individual cognitive style and learning rate of every school student. These challenges make the upgrading of psychological culture in schools an inevitable demand.