MindCraft Challenges

Hope training has been used with people facing big obstacles (like the cancer patients linked in the ‘Read More’ section). Hope training involves learning to set goals, to imagine pathways, and to talk to yourself about how to accomplish those goals.

Challenge: Hope training can also help people overcome everyday obstacles. On mindcraftchallenge.com, you will find a set of diary prompts for a week-long home hope training challenge. You can track your hopeful progress using the hope scale we discussed in class: https://cognopod.com/sketch/HOPE.

Hope Training Prompts:
https://mindcraftchallenge.com/RESOURCES/HOPE-TRAINING-WORKSHEET.docx

Read More
Hope training diary prompts
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110383
Hope training helps cancer patients
https://doi.org/10.1177/2377960819844381

One of the challenges of hunger motivation is that people can’t completely cut eating out of their lives—so complete avoidance is not an option. Genetic set points and environmental influences also make it difficult to change eating patterns. The most recent research by Traci Mann suggests that adopting new healthy habits is easier than getting rid of old bad habits—especially by modifying the environment (making good choices more easily available, pre-packaging food in intended portions).

Challenge: Make one structural change to your environment to make a healthy choice easier. What change did you make? Did it make that healthy choice easier?

Read More
A review of eating and self-control
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-012424-035404
The stigma of weight controllability in the workplace
https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2023.78

There are three categories of actions that Folkman and Moskowitz report people using to self-regulate their emotions during periods of severe stress. These are positive reappraisal (focusing on the good and what is happening and finding ways to grow), problem-focused coping (solving attainable goals to reduce distress), and creating positive events in their lives.

Challenge: If you are experiencing severe end-of-semester stress (or high levels of continuing stress in your life for any reason), try these three categories of coping. Were you able to experience more positive emotions? Did that help you handle your stress?

Read More
Three Ways to Cope with High Stress
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00073
Stress triggers intentional use of positive emotions
https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001362
Self-compassion—an additional coping strategy
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047

Actors involve their bodies and emotions in learning, with remarkable results. These results are part of a broader pattern in the study of memory known as the enactment effect: when people act out an instruction or a pattern, their memory is more effective than when they simply hear it.

Challenge: How can you use the enactment effect? If what you are learning has associated spatial information (a diagram, a process, or a sequence) or can be converted to that information, you can act out the layout or sequence of the information by talking while you move your hand or body through the space. For example, rather than just looking at a Krebs Cycle diagram, you might walk the cycle while gesturing to describe what is happening at each step. Think about how your movement can point to the next step or idea: goal-directed movement is the key, not just movement without any purpose!

Read More
Subject-performed tasks improve memory
https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.3.524
https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194399
Goal-directed movement is key for actors’ memory
https://doi.org/10.1080/01638530701498911

Acting as an agent can make a big difference. However, people don’t always think about whether they can be agents. College classrooms are one place where this often happens—students don’t always realize that they can actively improve their classes. Erika Patall and her colleagues demonstrated that student motivation improves when they learn to act as agents.

Challenge: Read the short version of Patall’s training course (linked below). Make sure that you complete the letter-writing activity at the end. Try to apply what you learn about agency and motivation in one of your classes. Did your classroom experience change?

Training: https://mindcraftchallenge.com/RESOURCES/make-any-class-better.pdf

Read More
Student agency to change motivation
https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000614
Student engagement improves motivation
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034934
Student actions create supportive classrooms
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032690

People can change their personality traits by choosing and completing actions that stretch them toward desired personality change. Nathan Hudson and his colleagues demonstrated this in a study where people could choose actions that shifted them toward extraversion (E), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), emotional stability (S), or openness to experience (O).

Challenge: I've created a web app where you can randomly generate your next challenge. Try these challenges for a week and see if your personality starts to move in the direction of the tasks. Hudson’s original study took place over 15 weeks. We don't have 15 weeks, so you might have to engage in actions more frequently than the one Hudson asked of his students per week. (You can find a copy of the list of 250 tasks on LearningHub under today's class.)

https://www.cognopod.com/sketch/COFC/ 

Read More
250 tasks to change personality
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000221
Personality changes according to desired change
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000021
Therapy changes personality
https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000088

Kristin Laurin and her colleagues conducted one of many studies demonstrating that thinking about God can change people's behavior. In their study, they activated people's thoughts about God. People were more likely to be resistant to temptation—however, they were also less likely to actively pursue goals when they thought about a controlling God. Laurin and her colleagues interpreted this as people feeling less like agents while thinking about an omnipotent God (the participant’s religious beliefs didn’t change the pattern). When people thought about God as a guide, they were both resistant to temptation and willing to pursue their goals.

Challenge: Spend a day regularly reading, memorizing, and reciting Psalm 121. Did your motivation or susceptibility to temptation change from what it usually is as you thought about God’s constant guidance?

Read More
The Laurin “thinking about God” study:
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025971
More about religion and self-control:
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014213

What should a person do if they realize that they have hostile habits online or in real life (or, likely, both)? Sheri Johnson and her colleagues used a WOOP intervention (a kind of implementation intention) to help people develop a plan for hostile habits.

Challenge: If you have a hostile online habit that you want to reduce, form and implement a WOOP plan:

Wish: (What do you want to stop doing?)
Outcome: (What is your goal?)
Obstacle: (What is the trigger of your habit?)
Plan: (How will you stop the trigger from activating the habit? What will you do instead?)

Implement your WOOP plan for a week. Were you able to reduce the hostile habit as you wished?

Read More
The WOOP intervention
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2020.103708
Another intervention to reduce hostile attributions and aggression
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10147-8

How do we remember to do something in the future? Planning a future action and then remembering to actually do it is known as prospective memory. Peter Gollwitzer’s solution to the problem of prospective memory failure is implementation intentions: choosing a future cue and linking it to an intended action.

Challenge: Think of a common prospective memory failure you face (where you intended to do something but failed to do it when the moment arrived). Create an implementation intention for that prospective memory:

If I ________________, I will ________________.

Write down the implementation intention and place it somewhere you will see it every morning. Say it out loud to yourself when you see it. Did you avoid prospective memory failure?

Read More
The Psychology of Planning
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-021524-110536
Cues and implementation intentions
https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2014.975816
An early description of implementation intentions
https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

An earlier challenge was about making a habit, but this challenge is about breaking a habit. Wendy Wood and her colleagues discovered that when students transferred to a new university, their habits (exercising, TV watching, and reading) were disrupted because the cue that started the cycle of cue-habit-reinforcer was missing. This suggests avoiding cues to habits you want to change might be an important first step.

Challenge: Identify a habit that you want to block. Try to identify the context or situation that is the cue for your cue-habit-reinforcer cycle. It might be something in the environment or an internal state. Now, try to disrupt the cue so it can’t start the cycle (avoid certain places at certain times, plan actions that disrupt internal states). Did the disruption help you block an unwanted habit?

Read More:
Disrupting habits
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.6.918
Habits and behavior change
https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241246480