Good Stress vs. Bad Stress: How Stress can Impair or Improve Performance

Some people thrive during stress

Today features another superb guest blog on Psych-Your-Mind! In this post Kate Reilly, outstanding first year graduate student at New York University, discusses how some forms of stress can paradoxically be good for one's performance. Read on! 

Imagine times in your life when you felt stress – a job interview, a first date, a piano recital, or a championship soccer game. It’s no wonder you may have felt stress in these situations: They are meaningful, they require effort to achieve success, and they involve evaluation by others. Each of these factors can  contribute to feelings of uneasiness and anxiety.

The question is: how do these feelings of stress impact performance?

Friday Fun: A few simple tricks for healthier eating

Who could resist?

Confession: Today I ate three cookies. Not because I particularly wanted them, but because they were there. I could be a case study for Brian Wansink’s book “Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we should.” Wansink was one of the invited speakers at SPSP 2012 and he and his colleagues, such as David Just, apply psychology and behavioral economics to food marketing. They use experiments to answer questions such as, “Why do we eat more than we should?” and “How do we get kids to pick healthier food in the school cafeteria?”

Here are a few of their scientifically-backed tips for making healthier food choices. Many of these tips have been put in place in lunchrooms as part of their “Smarter Lunchrooms Initiative,” but I think they can also be adapted for use at home, particularly if you are struggling with a child who has very particular food preferences.

The Bachelor: A modern-day replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Bachelor Ben and his ladies.

In 1971 a group of Stanford researchers led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted what became a famous study of the power of  deindividuating situations. Within only six days, twenty-four seemingly normal, psychologically healthy participants were transformed into sadistic prison guards and dejected, emotionally unstable prisoners who came to voluntarily tolerate the abuse that was inflicted on them.

Thirty-one years later, the first episode of "The Bachelor" was aired on ABC. During the show, twenty-five single women compete for the affections of one man (with the reverse in "The Bachelorette") as they travel to scenic destinations, ride in lots of helicopters and boats, and enjoy lavish accommodations. What could the Stanford Prison Experiment possibility have to do with a fun, light-hearted reality show? A lot, it turns out.

SPSP 2012: Poster Highlights

Not actually SPSP but the closest I could find

As Amie said in a previous post, SPSP poster sessions are like your "elementary school science fair, but all grown up and on steroids." With over 2,000 posters spanning topics ranging from the psychology of political ideology to the link between rejection and health to the dynamics of cheating behavior, it's easy to become overwhelmed. In recent years, posters in a given subject area (e.g., "Emotion") are grouped together within each session, which helps people peruse more efficiently. Though sometimes it's nice just to wander through the aisles and see what jumps out. Here are ten findings that stood out to me in this weekend's poster sessions:

SPSP 2012: Social Relationships Round-up

Here at SPSP 2012 I’ve been enjoying the sunny, warm weather, eating more than I should and sleeping less, and gathering interesting tidbits of information about social relationships from across the talks and posters that I’ve seen. Here are a few of the findings that stood out to me:

SPSP 2012: How does culture change over time?

Today's "Cultural Change Over Time" symposium was a perfect example of why I enjoy SPSP so much: The talks involved (1) compelling research questions answered using (2) innovative methods. Anyway, the general question the researchers of this symposium attempted to answer was "How can we tell if culture is changing across time?" The answers might surprise you!

SPSP 2012: Watchdogs, Witch-hunts, and What to do about False-Positive Findings

In a recent trend, the field of social-personality psychology has become sensitive to the data reporting and analytic strategies that go into the publication of a research paper. Today at the “False Positive Findings are Frequent Findable and Fixable” symposium at SPSP the three speakers presented some very polarizing observations about this trend in our field.

SPSP 2012: Oxytocin, Threat, and the “Mama Bear Effect”

“Oxytocin may be critically involved in both ethnocentrism and parochial altruism.”

-Carsten de Dreu, University of Amsterdam

Long called the “Love Hormone,” the hormone oxytocin has been implicated for more than a decade in such prosocial activities as empathy, trust, and generosity (with both human and animal models). At the social neuroendocrinology pre-conference at this year’s SPSP conference, some influential researchers in the field of social psychology laid out why oxytocin might also have another side that is less fuzzy, and more defensive.