How to beat exam stress - insights from Psychology

 Published this week an interesting article on how to beat exam stress with the power of your mind
but what does psychological research say about stress ?

Matthew Owens, Jim Stevenson, Julie A. Hadwin, Roger Norgate. When does anxiety help or hinder cognitive test performance? The role of working memory capacity. British Journal of Psychology, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12009  found that in a study of 96 school students, anxiety only had a negative effect on test results if memory was also poor.. On the contrary if memory was good, anxiety resulted in better results. .
However exam time  does often lead to poor diets.

Perceived changes in food intake in response to stress: The role of conscientiousness.
O'Connor, Daryl B. ; O'Connor, Rory C. ; Stress and Health: Journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress, 2004, Vol.20 (5), p.279-292
These results suggest that when faced with a stressful encounter,individuals who are perfectionists  may be less well equipped to cope and as a result start to eat more  high energy snacks 

Other free places where you can search for high quality psychology articles on this topic are:

On a more practical note Mind has shared 14 tips from students to beat exam stress 
Student minds have a top 5 


PsyDok  open access repository  that specialises in psychology. Has links to papers and articles.

PubPsych –This freely accessible search portal for psychology. Content contains the records of approximately 9,000 journal articles, books and book chapters, intervention programmes, research data, and psychodiagnostic tests from all sub-fields of psychology. Many records contain links to full texts, where available.

PsychSpider – Search engine searches for references to articles and papers relating to psychology. Many in German

Subscription databases include: PsychInfo
Web of Science
Scopus

Social Science sites of the week

Happy new year

Welcome to 2016 with the latest update of new and interesting sites for social scientists

 

New Year’s resolutions.

Try  the RSA social brain quiz to find out what new year’s resolution you should choose and how you can stick to it.

It is based on the findings of a recent Royal Society report Easier Said than done – why we struggle with healthy behaviours and what can be done about it. This 33 page report has some practical tips on positive lifestyle changes to encourage healthy walking, eating, sleeping and talking which are based on psychological research

See some links to insights from psychology research on our recent blog posting.

Central African Republic elections.

Elections finally took place on the 31^st December. Find out more about the human rights background plus get news reports and  press releases from the 2015 election observation teams on our elections blog.

Fat Cat Tuesday

On the 5^th January 2016 top bosses salaries  FTSE CEOS will already have exceeded the average annual pay of many workers (£27,645) according to the High Pay Centre

Find out how your wages compare using their pay calculator

Price Waterhouse Cooper conducts regular surveys on the state of executive pay in the UK

According to a recent survey from CIPD 71% of employees think CEO pay is too high in the UK.

In an associated report on the behavioural impact of high wages on CEO behaviour and motivation CIPD recommended that pay rises became evidence based.

NCVO conducted an inquiry into executive pay in the charity sector. The final report from 2014 can be downloaded from their website

Norton Rose Fulbright maintain a UK Corporate Governance portal which as a really useful collection of links to recent reports from the UK government, trade associations and other bodies on executive pay. These cover regulation, performance related pay and ethics related issues.

First Anniversary of Charlie Hebdo attacks

Twitter coverage of the anniversary

The University of Oxford has translated and made free on the Internet a book on tolerance. With extracts from key French philosophers and writers. The original text was

La Société Française d'Etude du Dix-Huitième Siècle (ed.), Tolerance: le combat des Lumières (Paris: SFEDS, 2015). Contents include:

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 1789
Voltaire, ‘Prayer to God’, from Treatise on Tolerance, 1763
Three aphorisms from Denis Diderot, Philosophical Thoughts, 1746; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748; and Voltaire, Portable Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
Nicolas de Condorcet, 'On Admitting Women to the Rights of Citizenship', 1790
John Locke, Letter on Toleration, 1686

Harvard University is in the middle of creating a physical and virtual archive of materials relating to the 2015 attack. See an explanation of the archive on its own pages. This page has some preliminary data visualizations of georeferenced tweets using the Je suis charlie hashtag

New York Times Learning Network lesson plans to encourage students to consider concepts relating to journalism and blasphemy

Newsmuseum – has archived front pages of over 900 newspapers which enables some brief comparison of coverage and headlines across the world. January 8^th 2015 coverage and

January 12^th Coverage

The Internet Archive has preserved over 3,000 pages from a variety of institutions and social media preserving contemporary responses to the attacks

What makes cities competitive?

Find out by downloading a recent working paper from the World Bank

Kilroy, Austin Francis Louis; Mukim, Megha; Negri, Stefano. 2015. Competitive cities for jobs and growth : what, who, and how. Competitive cities for jobs and growth. Its objective is to create a knowledge base on what  makes cities competitive, to improve the understanding of  job creation at the city level, and to establish a foundation for

a community of practice on this topic

The A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index (GCI) ranks 125 cities according to 27criteria  across five main themes  business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement.

JLL’s Global300 cities has a ranking of cities worldwide attracting the most commercial real estate activity.

Cities of Opportunity Price Waterhouse Cooper ranks 30 leading cities in terms of social and economic factors such as cost, transport infrastructure, safety, ease of doing business

‘Many Postgraduates are overwhelmed by their workloads’

According to the results of the latest Postgraduate Taught Experience survey published by the Higher Education Academy 72,000 students from over a 100 institutions took part giving their opinion on workloads, motivation, and quality of teaching and learning.

Some potentially interesting points arising for service providers problems relating to workload – can libraries help students organise their time / research more effectively/ develop time management skills?

Employability – large numbers of students mention that a key motivation in enrolling was to improve career prospects. Can libraries highlight / teach skills that will help students in the workplace or find jobs?

Find more free reports on HE education, teaching and learning on our scoop,it page

Agents of Future Promise: children’s burden or benefit?

During 2015 researchers at the University of Leeds, Cardiff and Huddersfield. Examined ideology in the portrayal of children in British and French history from the 19^th century to the post war era. The project website now has videoed discussion from the end of project workshop help in September 2015. Topics covered include toys and gender, toys and the British empire, the Vichy regime and children, the use of children to envisage the future in wartime Britain.

Top 100  Global Innovators.

Thomson Reuters has just released its annual ranking of the most innovative global organisations .  It analyses patent  and citation data across four main criteria: volume, success, globalization and

influence using Thomson Reuters solutions including Derwent World Patents

Index (DWPI), Thomson Innovation and Derwent Patent Citations Index (PCI). The site includes breakdowns by region and industry as well as details on the methodology used.

Coming soon: 2016 US elections.
RealClearPolitics: Election 2016

This site from RealClearPolitics offers readers daily updates on polls, interviews, speeches, and other news related to the 2016 election. It currently includes polls relating to the Republican and Democratic nominations.

Stunning images of Earth

As Tim Peake and space continue to dominate the news. View some amazing images of earth from the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. The site also has some free downloads of lunaserv mapping

New year resolutions- social science research

If you are one of the many millions of people worldwide who has made a New Year resolution? Here are some useful insights from social science research.

Why are resolutions often made at the beginning of a year?
According to a recent NPR radio interview with Shankar Vedantam key time landmarks such as new years are seen as psychologically good points for making a new start and reinventing the self. However this also means that smaller landmark events such as birthdays or other holidays could also be good starting points.

What insights does psychology offer into behaviour change?
An expert on changing behaviours and new year resolutions is Professor John Norcross of Scranton university. A number of his studies have tracked individuals.

In a two year longitudinial study published as: Norcross, J.C., Mrykalo, M.S., & Blagys, M.D. (2002). Auld lang syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year's resolvers and nonresolvers. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58(4), 397-405. Key factors in success were seen to be related to self efficacy. It was not enough simply to desire to change they also needed stimulus control, reinforcement management, positive thinking, and avoidance strategies to keep their resolution. A free summary of some of this research can be found on the APA blog.

Issues of self control have also been discussed by Mukhopadhyay, Anirban ; Johar, Gita venkataramani Where There Is a Will, Is There a Way? Effects of Lay Theories of Self‐Control on Setting and Keeping Resolutions  Journal of Consumer Research, 2005, Vol.31(4), pp.779-786

Another problem is creating unrealistic resolutions Psychology professor Peter Herman and his colleagues at Toronto University have identified what they call "false hope syndrome,"  when a person's resolution is out of alignment with their internal view of themselves. See the full text in
If at first you don't succeed. False hopes of self-change
Polivy, Janet ; Herman, C Peter The American psychologist 2002, Vol.57(9), pp.677-89

How can we keep our resolutions?
Psychology today blog has some practical steps on self regulation taken from psychology research
The Conversation blog also has some tips from UK academics.

Finally try the
Try the RSA social brain quiz to find out what new year resolution you should choose and how to stick to it. It is based on scientific facts contained within the latest RSA report Easier said than done- why we struggle with healthy behaviours. See Psychcentral for a free discussion of this.

LSE staff and students can search for references to articles on this topic using
PsycINFO - a specialist database of the American Psychological Association providing abstracts of articles relevant to all fields of psychology from the 19th century to the present day.  

PubMed Central - free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature from the U.S. National Institute of Health's National Library of Medicine.