An example of escapism
In yesterday’s PRACTICA, Joyce presented some work that she had guided Dr. Xioadan Hu on exploring the associations between symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) in adolescents and the behavioral choices they made when selecting types of online content.
An example of doomscrolling
The results of that work are still under review, and are theirs to tell, but the question was interesting: does GAD symptomology correlate more strongly with engaging in doomscrolling or escapism when it comes to social media use? Although the original study used self-reported responses and behavioral choice of media content as dependent variables, she has great interest in using psychophysiological indices in the future to explore stress responses to these two different general types of content that teens and young adults (and professors!?!) spend an awful lot of time with during their ‘down time.’
To demonstrate to the group how this can be done (remember, many attendees of PRACTICA are brand new to these measures) she introduced us to a very robust publication in Nature from Yeager al. (2022). The researchers at UT-Austin, Stanford, Rochester, and Google’s Empathy Lab tested the efficacy of a short, low-cost intervention that teaches adolescents the benefits of “a stress optimization approach, defined as learning to engage positively with rigorous but useful social and academic stressors, rather than seeking indiscriminately to minimize or avoid stress” (pg. 512).
This approach was developed in response to a popular sentiment that in order to avoid the global ‘mental health pandemic’ one should avoid any type of stress at all costs. The authors argue that this leads adolescents to back away from anything taxing, including tough academic course work–an action that runs counter to a society where success requires understanding of a technologically-driven world, something that only comes through stressful periods of learning in “more advanced coursework in mathematics and science than ever before to remain competitive” (pg. 512).
Rather than avoiding stress, Yeager et al. (2022) argue that adolescents should be taught to approach stressful times with ‘a synergistic mindset,’ one that combines a recognition that ability is not fixed but can be developed with effort (e.g. stress is helpful and controllable) and that stress can be enhancing. It the latter recognition that specifically contains a psychophysiological element–but one as a personal experience rather than a measure. The ‘stress-can-be-enhancing mindset’ is one where people recognize
“…that our psychophysiological stress response (for example, sweaty palms, racing heart, deeper breathing and feeling anxious) can be positive (because these changes mobilize energy and delivery oxygenated blood to the brain and tissues) and can be controlled once you understand its purpose (because you can choose to take advantage of the enhanced capacity for performance it fuels rather than being worried and distracted by it)” (pg. 513).
So, to see whether teaching adolescents to view stress through this synergistic mindset had an effect on how they responded to actual stress, they conducted six studies using over 5000 participants. In study 3 they used psychophysiology as a dependent measure, particularly they calculated something called Total Peripheral Resistance (TPR) which is a measure of how constricted the blood vessels are in the limbs. It’s calculated using measures of ECG (electrical heart signals), Blood Pressure, and ICG (impedance cardiography; a way of measuring the sympathetic nervous systems influence on the heart). The experiment worked like this: half the participants were taught to view stressful events using the synergistic intervention…the other half were served as control comparisons. They all participants went through what’s known as the Trier Social Stress Test. They are told that they had to give an unexpected speech to a group of evaluators about their personal strengths and weaknesses. The evaluators where confederates instructed to frown and look discouragingly at the participants. Stressful, right! Then, after the speech…surprise…now you have to do mental math: “now, count backwards from 996 by 7.” Evaluators were quick to say when they got an answer incorrect and the participant was told to begin again. Physiology measures were taken all along the way and in the figure below you see that TPR can not only serve as a good measure of stress (something that it’s good for the PRACTICA group to learn and know) but also that the Yeager et al. (2022) intervention was effective at helping the adolescents reframe a difficult experience.
