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Reappraising Stress Arousal Improves Affective, Neuroendocrine, and Academic Performance Outcomes in Community College Classrooms

American Psychological Association
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Authors:
Jeremy Jamieson at University of Rochester
Jeremy Jamieson
Alexandra E. Black
Alexandra E. Black
Alexandra E. Black
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Libbey Pelaia-Krumhansl
Libbey Pelaia-Krumhansl
Hannah Gravelding
Hannah Gravelding
Hannah Gravelding
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Abstract

The field experiment presented here applied a stress regulation technique to optimize affective and neuroendocrine responses and improve academic and psychological outcomes in an evaluative academic context. Community college students (N = 339) were randomly assigned to stress reappraisal or active control conditions immediately before taking their second in-class exam. Whereas stress is typically perceived as having negative effects, stress reappraisal informs individuals about the functional benefits of stress and is hypothesized to reduce threat appraisals, and subsequently, improve downstream outcomes. Multilevel models indicated that compared with controls, reappraising stress led to less math evaluation anxiety, lower threat appraisals, more adaptive neuroendocrine responses (lower cortisol and higher testosterone levels on testing days relative to baseline), and higher scores on Exam 2 and on a subsequent Exam 3. Reappraisal students also persisted in their courses at a higher rate than controls. Targeted mediation models suggested stress appraisals partially mediated effects of reappraisal. Notably, procrastination and performance approach goals (measured between exams) partially mediated lagged effects of reappraisal on subsequent performance. Implications for the stress, emotion regulation, and mindsets literatures are discussed. Moreover, alleviating negative effects of acute stress in community college students, a substantial but understudied population, has potentially important applied implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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Reappraising Stress Arousal Improves Affective, Neuroendocrine, and
Academic Performance Outcomes in Community College Classrooms
Jeremy P. Jamieson
1
, Alexandra E. Black
1
, Libbey E. Pelaia
2
, Hannah Gravelding
1
,
Jonathan Gordils
1
, and Harry T. Reis
1
1
Department of Psychology, University of Rochester
2
Department of Mathematics, Cuyahoga Community College
The field experiment presented here applied a stress regulation technique to optimize affective and neu-
roendocrine responses and improve academic and psychological outcomes in an evaluative academic
context. Community college students (N= 339) were randomly assigned to stress reappraisal or active
control conditions immediately before taking their second in-class exam. Whereas stress is typically per-
ceived as having negative effects, stress reappraisal informs individuals about the functional benefits of
stress and is hypothesized to reduce threat appraisals, and subsequently, improve downstream outcomes.
Multilevel models indicated that compared with controls, reappraising stress led to less math evaluation
anxiety, lower threat appraisals, more adaptive neuroendocrine responses (lower cortisol and higher tes-
tosterone levels on testing days relative to baseline), and higher scores on Exam 2 and on a subsequent
Exam 3. Reappraisal students also persisted in their courses at a higher rate than controls. Targeted
mediation models suggested stress appraisals partially mediated effects of reappraisal. Notably, procras-
tination and performance approach goals (measured between exams) partially mediated lagged effects
of reappraisal on subsequent performance. Implications for the stress, emotion regulation, and mindsets
literatures are discussed. Moreover, alleviating negative effects of acute stress in community college stu-
dents, a substantial but understudied population, has potentially important applied implications.
Keywords: stress, reappraisal, challenge and threat, psychophysiology, community college
Supplemental materials: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000893.supp
Whether you think you can, or you can’t—either way, you’re
right.—Henry Ford
Supporting proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (STEM) is important for addressing 21st century
demands. STEM vocations are growing at faster rates with lower
unemployment and greater earning potential than non-STEM
vocations (Carnevale et al., 2013;Fayer et al., 2017). Employment
in STEM vocations, though, requires STEM training, especially
at the postsecondary level. Postsecondary STEM education,
however, has traditionally underrepresented individuals from
low-income and/or stigmatized groups, creating a “skills gap”in
American society (White & Shakibnia, 2019). Community col-
lege systems, which are affordable 2-year programs in the United
States that provide open access to postsecondary education, offer
a promising and powerful mechanism for reducing skills gaps by
preparing students for 4-year university programs and providing
workforce development—that is, helping people maintain/
upgrade professional skills and meet/maintain licensure require-
ments (Lowry & Thomas-Anderson, 2017).
Supporting STEM achievement is particularly important for
underserved populations in the educational pipeline, such as com-
munity college students. Although community college students
comprise a large proportion (42%) of U.S. postsecondary students
(Ma & Baum, 2016) there remains a lack of research on this
group, which is especially notable because community college stu-
dents are disproportionately members of underrepresented groups
(Carnevale et al., 2018). Moreover, community colleges often
serve as the “last stop”in the educational system for students. If
students do not pass community college courses and matriculate to
4-year programs, their vocational options and lifetime earnings
potential are hamstrung (Autor et al., 2008;Webber, 2016). Thus,
This article was published Online First July 22, 2021.
Jeremy P. Jamieson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3790-8747
Jonathan Gordils is now at Department of Psychology, University of
Hartford.
Data for this research were collected as part of a larger project funded by
the U.S. Department of Education (R305A150036) awarded to Jeremy P.
Jamieson and Harry T. Reis. We thank Tracy Boykins for her invaluable
help recruiting classrooms and overseeing data collection procedures at one
of the campuses, Aaron Altose for recruiting classrooms and his help
developing manipulation materials, the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching for their help developing materials, as well as
the many research assistants in the Social Stress Lab at Rochester for their
help organizing data into electronic summary files.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jeremy P.
Jamieson, Department of Psychology, University of Rochester, Meliora
Hall, P.O. Box 270266, Rochester, NY 14627, United States. Email:
jeremy.jamieson@rochester.edu
197
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
©2021 American Psychological Association 2022, Vol. 151, No. 1, 197–212
ISSN: 0096-3445 https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000893
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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... The content of the SAR intervention was structured according to previously used SAR materials (Beltzer et al., 2014;Jamieson et al., 2022Jamieson et al., , 2012. Participants watched a 7-min screencast explaining the functionality of bodily stress responses (e.g., faster breathing as a sign of additional oxygen intake) and their evolutionary purpose. ...
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Stress, Mindsets, and Success in Navy SEALs Special Warfare Training
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Mindsets can impact an individual’s performance in stressful experiences such as public speaking or receiving negative feedback. Yet we know little about the boundary conditions of where these mindsets predict success, and where they may become irrelevant or even maladaptive. The current research asks whether mindsets are beneficial in environments of extreme physical and mental stress using participants undergoing the notoriously challenging Navy SEALs training. We hypothesized that participants with stress-is-enhancing mindsets – who believe stress enhances their health, performance and wellbeing – will outperform those with stress-is-debilitating mindsets. In addition, we explore whether other mindsets about willpower and failure predict success in a similar manner. Following 174 Navy SEALs candidates, we find that, even in this extreme setting, stress-is-enhancing mindsets predict greater persistence through training, faster obstacle course times, and fewer negative evaluations from peers and instructors. We also find evidence that failure-is-enhancing mindsets may be detrimental to candidates’ success, and non-limited willpower mindsets prompt negative evaluations from others. Multiverse analyses were conducted to test for the robustness of these effects across researcher analytical decisions, which produced consistent results. We discuss how findings in this unique environment can provide insight into the importance of mindsets in other organizations and propose future avenues of research to further understand the causal role of mindsets in diverse workplace contexts.
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A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement
Article
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  • Sep 2019
  • NATURE
A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention—which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed—improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased overall enrolment to advanced mathematics courses in a nationally representative sample of students in secondary education in the United States. Notably, the study identified school contexts that sustained the effects of the growth mindset intervention: the intervention changed grades when peer norms aligned with the messages of the intervention. Confidence in the conclusions of this study comes from independent data collection and processing, pre-registration of analyses, and corroboration of results by a blinded Bayesian analysis.
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