School is stressful. Students also commonly must deal with emotions arising from boy-girl problems, over-bearing parent problems, bullies, worries about school, frustrated attempts to be popular, and their future. College students have enormous adjustments to make in the transition from leaving home and the cloistered environment they were used to in high school. Older adults returning to school have to cope with paying the costs, finding time for the family, and for the job.
The aspects of lifestyle that have
the greatest direct effect on learning deal with stress, exercise, and sleep. This post explores stress.
Stress
Scientists have long known that chronic stress is bad for your brain. Adolescence seems to be an especially vulnerable time. Not only is the adolescent brain still being built, the brain is being re-built during the teen years.
Human imaging studies
show the cerebral cortex shrinks during adolescence. In a recent study of
"adolescent" rats, researchers found that the cortex shrinks in both
males and females, and there is a loss of neurons in the ventral prefrontal cortex,
the part of the brain humans use to make rational decisions and do higher-level
thinking. More loss occurred in females than in males.
Until now, the reason
for brain tissue loss has not been clear, but we may be able to explain it by
considering the stresses that afflict teenagers, who routinely endure peer
dismissiveness and bullying. Numerous animal studies show that stress impairs
brain function and memory. Even single bullying exposures can be damaging.
Similar results have
been reported in multiple humans studies. Here is a very real example of
stress-related memory impairment from human bullying in schools that few may
realize. In the study, young healthy men were tested for their ability to
recall lists of 10 positive, 10 neutral, and 10 negative words. The men were
given two minutes to learn the lists and were then tested immediately. Thirty
minutes later they were given a psychosocial stress which included a fictitious
job interview in front of live interviewers and counting backwards in steps of
17 in front of judges. Control groups did a five-minute speech and did the same
counting, but not in the presence of judges. The next day, subjects were tested
again (delayed recall) 10 minutes after cortisol injection. Other psychological
tests were administered and the amount of cortisol in the saliva was measured
at several key points in time.
The stressed group had
elevated cortisol levels even though the stress was mild. Recall of both
negative and positive emotionally arousing words was impaired, but there was no
effect with neutral words. These effects could not be attributed to decreased
attention or working memory span, which memory tests showed were not affected
by the stress. Providing cues for recall eliminated signs of the stress effect
on emotionally charged words.
So, this study shows
recall of emotionally charged information can be impaired under stressed
conditions. Imagine how great the deleterious effect of stress could be in
situations where there is real stress, as in witnessing car accidents, crimes,
or dangerous situations in which recalling what happened could be very
important. Studies like this are consistent with many real-life observations
with eye-witness accounts, where what is remembered may well be false.
The most obvious
stressor for students comes from examinations. “Test anxiety” causes students
to choke, typically failing to recall information they know they know, but just
can’t dredge up under stressful test conditions.
A couple of studies
have shown that test scores rise if anxious students are allowed to write about
their test worries for 10 minutes just before a test. It also works to write
down attributes of successful problem solving just before a test.
Why does this writing
alleviate test anxiety? One study showed that such writing increased student
engagement in the test. That is, students who were anxious were distracted by
their anxiety and did not fully engage in solving the problems in the test.
Such writing before an
exam is only beneficial for students who suffer from test anxiety. Other
students don’t need this, and may in fact do worse by such a distraction. The
best way to deal with choking on tests is to: 1) thoroughly know and understand
the material being tested, and 2) develop long-term confidence by a string of
test successes. If you truly “know your stuff” and believe in your ability as a
student, there is no justification for test anxiety.
Next Lesson: 14b. Lifestyle Matters: Exercise
Stress Sources:
Merz, Christian (2010). Stress impairs retrieval of socially
relevant information. Behavioral Neuroscience. 124 (2), 288-293.
Newcomer, J. W., Selke, G., Melson, A. K., Hershey, T.,
Craft, S., Richards, K., et al. (1999). Decreased memory performance in healthy
humans induced by stress-level cortisol treatment. Archives of General
Psychiatry, 56, 527–533.
Vogel, Susanne (2016). Learning and memory under stress:
implications for the classroom. Science of Learning 1(1), 16011. DOI:
10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.11
Young, A. H., Sahakian, B. J., Robbins, T. W., & Cowen,
P. J. (1999). The effects of chronic administration of hydrocortisone on
cognitive function in normal male volunteers. Psychopharmacology (Berl), 145,
260-266.
Zoladza, Phillip R., Ashlee J.Warneckea, Sarah A.Woelkea, Hanna
M.Burkea, Rachael M.Frigoa, Julia M.Pisanskya, Sarah M, Lylea, Jeffery
N.Talbotb (2013). Pre-learning stress that is temporally removed from acquisition
exerts sex-specific effects on long-term memory. Neurobiology of Learning and
Memory. 100, 77-87 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2012.12.012
