Preventing stress

Naboo beats all the stress management techniques out there with the kitten in a barrel routine

It's highly likely that you're going to feel some stress in the coming weeks. A little is good: it sharpens your thinking and fuels your motivation; but too much is bad.

Not is it only bad for all the malaise it causes but it damages your working memory (e.g., Morgan et al., 2006), which you need to think and solve problems with, and your ability to solidify long-term memories (e.g., Chen et al., 2008), which you obviously need to remember course content. Also, "[y]our IQ plummets. Your creativity, your sense of humor — all of that disappears. You're stupid." according to psychiatrist Edward Hallowell author of CrazyBusy. You may not need a sense of humour to write psychology essays (but it's probably a good thing to have to get through the revision process) but you'll want your creativity firing otherwise those top marks are out of reach.

Now there's lots out there on ameliorating stress. I might do a series of posts on a couple of things later. But for now I think it's better to think about what causes it. When it comes to exams, stress is the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

If you want a First, there are three weeks to exams and you haven't done a drop of revision, your stress level is going to be monstrous. If you don't care what you get, there are three weeks to exams and you haven't done a drop of revision, your stress level is going to fairly low.

Unfortunately, once the gap gets wide enough it'll start growing all by itself because stress deleteriously (ooh get me!) affects thinking and memory, precisely those things you need to narrow the gap. It's a nasty place to be.

To keep this distance to a minimum, you could always cut what you want your degree classification to be - but this is only a strategy for loafers. The alternative is to i) give yourself loads of time (i.e. start now), ii) draw up a good timetable so you can monitor and manage the 'stress distance' and iii) share out some of the immense requisite research.

This may sound achingly obvious but the obvious remains in the theoretical realm for some people until it is too late. There will be people (re)reading this post in a month's time and kicking themselves. Don't be one of them.

Get excited!

It's an annoying fact of evolutionary carpentry that human memory is so resistant to academic learning and yet so happy to soak up other things, like the plot of a film. We feel this difference intimately. Extracting a paper's details is hard. Absorbing a film's plot is easy.

Yet, when stripped down to their essentials, the amount of naked, quivering data in a paper and in a film are comparable. Both have antecedents, names, dates, a logical sequence and conclusions. Nevertheless, we pick up the film's details collaterally, whilst the paper takes a bit of cognitive mastication. Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn papers like we acquire the minutiae of a movie?

I think you can get close. Whilst a film undoubtedly unfurls more easily into the channels of memory than a paper - exploiting all those things our minds are very good at (face recognition, mapping social relationships, organising narratives of events etc) - there is another ingredient: excitement. When you watch a film you are stimulated and interested; a paper may seem like an ordeal. The latter has to change.

Getting interested

I am fully cognizant that excitement and interest can't just be turned on and off when you feel like it. However, the renaissance of research into that curious emotion, interest, has told that things are interesting when they are:

1. high in "novelty–complexity...which refers to evaluating an event as new, unexpected, complex, hard to process, surprising, mysterious, or obscure" (Silvia's 2008 CDIPS paper, p.58)
2. accessible enough that "[P]eople feel able to comprehend them and master the challenges that they [the novelty-complexity] pose (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)." (Silvia's 2008 CDIPS paper, p.58)

New papers and the ideas they house are likely to be new to you in the research stages of your revision and some are undoubtedly going to be complex. The first ingredient of interest is there.

This second point means that experts can be interested in things that cause novices to turn off because they have the knowledge to comprehend them.

This is important because the major reason I think people give up and get bored with experimental psychology is because they haven't put the groundwork in. If you enter new, complex stuff without the ability to understand it you will get bored.

The way to understand and get interested in this stuff is to understand the story leading up to it. This can only be done by voracious reading to acquire the 'big picture', which ironically may be rather dull.

However, once you master understanding you arrive at a lovely self-fulfilling cycle: the more you are interested by new, complex material, the more you learn about it, the more you are interested by new, complex material.

Bottom line: for interest to grow you need to feed it with a bit of boredom. In the vast majority of cases it will arise after hard, unexciting work when all confusion peals away and the elegant beauty of an area is revealed and it becomes interesting.

Extinguishing dislike

On the other hand, negativity towards your subject can be quashed and should be whenever you feel it creeping in. Remind yourself of what a fascinating subject yours is, both per se and relative to most other degrees. You are lucky to be studying it. If ever you forget this, peer over the partition in the library and see what your neighbour is working on.

Modern psychology or cognitive neuroscience is providing answers to all sorts of questions that have had philosophers scratching and pacing for millennia. Star Trek was wrong: space isn't the final frontier, we are. Our fantastically complex brains and behaviour are the most interesting bit of the unknown.

In an article in TIME, Pinker said "Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings." He was talking about evolution, but the point still stands. The mind has a lot of naïve impressions about itself. Overcoming them to find out how we humans tick is one of the most important and interesting pursuits of modern intellectual inquiry.

As you enter this revision and examination period you'll need to shrug off the 'Erg work. Isn't it shit' attitude and take on the spirit of the badges at the top of this blog. Get really excited about this subject, all the gems its has to offer and the possibility to be really knowledgeable in it. If you don't it's just going to be academic self-laceration over the next few months.

At worst, with all that knowledge you'll have interesting things to say and the cool blade of science with which to cut down others' naïve ideas about the human mind. At best, your interest will pay dividends in extra marks because you'll spend longer learning, studying and reading (and doing so more deeply) and lay down better memories (see Silvia, 2006). Either way, you improve something.

What I can be certain of though is that if you are intrigued by your degree, you'll start to feel that the effort required for all that learning ahead of you is magically lifted away. Suddenly references will start appearing in your mind without having to sit down and write them out twenty times, methodologies will etch themselves into you memory, and arguments will unfold themselves effortlessly.

This is both experience and fact talking. There is a thick wadge of evidence that shows if you are emotionally invested in material you'll learn it more easily and it will stick for longer (e.g. LeDoux, 2002; or for a fairly recent review see Labar and Cabeza, 2006). And, if you are positive about learning you'll out-perform those just huffing along (Dweck, 2006).

Instead of mediocrity, seek excellence in psychology. Instead of feeling duty-bound, be excited to be learning about the newest stuff in the sexiest science. It will make everything a lot easier.

Nothing makes any sense!

He's confused too. You are not the only one.

The more you read the more confused you become. Areas start out fairly straight-forward and rapidly become mired in dizzying confusion; one research group thinks black, another says white, a third seems to be saying grey but you aren't quite sure. Then some old goat says that actually there is no colour at all. Argh! Nothing makes any sense!

This is one of the most annoying feelings in the world. An arresting dissatisfaction with your understanding, like being stuck inside a David Lynch film. I am confident that it will be horribly familiar to most of you from researching essays.

The bad news is that it's only going to get worse as you attempt to make sense of whole courses (effectively the same work you did for an essay multiplied by the number of different areas you revise multiplied by your number of courses.)

At school (and with many other degrees) the information you need to learn is well set out, the conclusions have been arrived at already and you just need to soak them up. With this degree things are a bit tougher and it doesn't feel good. You need to research heavily and then try and make sense of it all.

The result of all this fishing with no fish to show for it is the 'whatever effect'; so overwhelmed are you by conflicting, theories, evidence and conclusions that you throw your hands up and say 'Whatever. I am off to the pub.'

I think the 'whatever effect' is one of the principle sources of grit in the resentment-of-psychology oyster, which in addition to being an unpleasant state to be in is not conducive to good marks. Being excited is good.

Throwing in the towel, also holds people back from higher marks because of the barrier it presents to understanding. The 'whatever effect' begets poor essays.

If you are happy to settle for a muddied picture of material then you don't deserve more marks but if you are hungry for those shiny extra prizes, you will need to work through confusion and learn to tolerate ambiguity until the fog clears (and it will clear if you are determined enough). It's a change in mindset: from being defensive and quitting to persisting when everything seems negative. It sounds a bit new agey, like you should be air punching when you get out of bed in the morning, but this is an idea with empirical support and cognitive benefits.

It will be tough. You'll have to hang up your party heels and put down your pint. However, beyond the unpleasant time spent grappling with the literature is a nirvana of clarity, where high scoring skills like critical thinking and creativity can flourish.

The other thing to remember is that you are not alone in this. Sometimes work is desperately lonely but it need not be: active discussion with others is often a shortcut to better understanding.

So if you are feeling confused - and the degree is deliberately designed to engender a bit of bafflement - don't give up. If you are willing to sweat a little, chew it over with friends and try and make sense of this confusion, higher marks and more more enjoyment await you.

Hitting the top of the net

For some people the top of net can be the difference between a First and a 2.1. With a little luck you make it over in to hallowed First territory. Or maybe you don't and you only wish luck had been more affectionate with you. After all, luck is what separates the highest 2.1s and lowest Firsts, isn't it? I am not so sure.

Like much of psychological research, this is a matter of averages. All other things being equal, if you increase the number of participants in a study the more reliable the data become; the chance of chance messing up your numbers is reduced with each new person through the door.

Your final degree classification does not suffer from too few participants. In fact, by the time you reach the end of your degree, your classification won't hang on the whim of the occasional marker or odd piece of alcohol-infused work you hand in. It will hang on the aggregated quality of your plentiful work.

Match Point is Woody Allen's most satisfying and chilly film in a long time and I think the fable about luck is appropriate in many situations - it is scary to think how big a role luck plays. However, with your degree classification luck is not the biggest player: consistently good work is.

Those of you who discover you are on the wrong side of 70% in June may feel unlucky but really you have not worked hard enough. You know the division is there. If you sense you are close, now is the time to make sure you start hitting the ball a little bit harder.