Browsing by Author "Hard, Bridgette"

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    Collectives Against Conflict: Evaluating School-Based Interventions Against Intimate Partner Violence in Durham, Wake and Orange Counties
    (2019-05) Pate, Sabriyya
    This thesis investigates the current status, challenges, and opportunities of school-based intimate partner violence primary interventions in Durham, Wake, and Orange counties. Particular attention is paid to program efficacy and how it is measured. The qualitative research defines the current status, challenges, and opportunities of prevention efforts in the three counties. Thereby, a mixed methods approach employing twelve expert interviews was used for this study. The participant population included experts with nation-wide experiences teaching, facilitating, litigating, and directing intimate partner violence prevention. Findings from a comprehensive literature review were integrated with the findings of the expert interviews. Interviews revealed the significance of community-oriented, well-funded approaches to locale-specific curricula in county schools. The interviews also revealed a discrepancy between the prevention efforts in Durham, as opposed to those Wake and Orange counties as a result of significant resourcing constraints in Durham.
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    Speaking of Stress: Predictors and Consequences of Stress Mindset in College Students
    (2021-05) Levin, Janette
    This paper focuses on the relevance of stress mindsets to college students. Stress mindsets describe the intuitive beliefs that people hold about the nature of stress as either enhancing or debilitating. In two studies, we sampled distinct groups of current or recent college students (N = 1170) regarding their stress mindsets, perceived distress, well-being, academic performance, procrastination habits, descriptions of stress, and personality characteristics. Our five main goals were to: (1) replicate prior findings that stress mindsets predict perceived distress, well-being, and academic outcomes (GPA), (2) assess how stress mindsets relate to procrastination, (3) explore whether language can reveal students’ stress mindsets, (4) consider how Big 5 personality traits inform stress mindsets, and (5) test whether stress mindset predicts important outcomes even when controlling for the potential third variable of personality. Our results supported prior research in noting that an enhancing stress mindset was associated with lower perceived distress, higher well-being, and higher GPA. Study 1 also indicated that an enhancing stress mindset predicted lower procrastination. Enhancing stress mindsets were significantly associated with positive emotional language, negative emotional language, and words related to drive, achievement, and reward across studies. Stress mindset was also associated with personality; participants were more likely to hold an enhancing stress mindset when they were lower in openness, higher in conscientiousness, higher in extraversion, and lower in neuroticism. Finally, after controlling for relevant personality traits, stress mindset continued to be a significant unique predictor of perceived distress, well-being, and GPA, but not procrastination. Together, our findings underscore the relevance of stress mindset to important outcomes in college students, suggesting that language can provide a window into stress mindsets, and that personality may play a role in shaping one’s beliefs about the nature of stress.
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    Stressed for Success: An Anxiety Reappraisal Video Intervention for Undergraduates
    (2019-04-16) Herrmann, Katherine
    Students everywhere can feel anxious about exams and are commonly met with the advice to “calm down.” However, researchers have found that it is the worries, not the bodily feelings associated with anxiety, that impair student performance, and thus advice to calm down does not target the harmful part of anxiety. An alternative approach is to target worry by helping students reappraise their anxiety as neutral or beneficial, instead of harmful. Reappraisal messages, delivered in the form of emails or paragraphs, have shown promising results for improving student performance. We tested whether delivering a reappraisal intervention in the form of animated video would improve student performance on a real college exam, compared to a control video describing basic study tips. An online feasibility study (Study 1) confirmed that the reappraisal message was effective at shifting participants’ beliefs about anxiety. Next, we tested whether the reappraisal message could improve student experience and performance in an introductory economics course (Study 2). Additionally, we examined for whom the intervention might work best by measuring baseline anxiety and beliefs about stress. Although the reappraisal message successfully shifted students’ beliefs about anxiety, it demonstrated no effect on performance compared to the control. Baseline measures of anxiety were predictive of performance and how students interacted with the reappraisal message.
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    Worried Sick: The Impact of Students’ Stress Mindsets on Health and Academic Performance
    (2019-04) Jenkins, Anna; Weeks, Molly; Hard, Bridgette
    The goal of this study was to evaluate how beliefs about stress as enhancing versus debilitating, also known as stress mindsets, relate to health and academic performance in an undergraduate sample. College students (n=499) were surveyed on their general and stressor-specific mindsets, and self-reported on their stress, health, coping, and GPA. Our findings suggest that beliefs about stress vary as a function of stressor type (acute versus chronic, and controllable versus uncontrollable), and that some stressor-specific mindsets may be more predictive of health than others. General mindsets were associated with health, consistent with prior findings. When stressor-specific mindsets were examines, chronic controllable mindsets were most pervasively related to health. Specifically, believing that chronic controllable stressors are harmful was related to worse mental and physical health. Consistent with prior findings, we found that measures of stress were associated with health, however this relationship was moderated by stress mindsets. Believing that stress is enhancing rather than debilitating appears to provide a psychological “buffer” against the negative effects of stress. Our work suggests that interventions which challenge students’ beliefs about stress may help students handle large amounts of stress with a lessened impact on their health. Interventions targeting chronic controllable mindsets may be more effective than current general stress mindset interventions. Future work calls for the development of student-oriented, stressor-specific stress mindset interventions.