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

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

One way that we think about and explain our identity is by telling our life story. When the most important events in our lives and the turning points (where the story of a life could have changed completely) are linked to meaning-making (understanding some aspect of one’s self), identity formation moves toward identity achievement.

One way to engage in meaning-making is through counterfactual thinking-imagining other paths that your life could have taken. Choose some aspect of your life right now (where you go to school, your major, the church you attend, your hobbies). Think about how you ended up at this point in your life.  Looking back, list (write about) the broad sequence of things that led to you being where you are. 

Next, write about all the ways things could have turned out differently. Did counterfactual thinking increase the feeling that your life is meaningful?

Read More
The Psychology of Life Stories
https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100
Life Stories and Meaning-Making
https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.42.4.714
Counterfactual Thinking and Meaning-Making
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017905
A Group Process for Reducing Identity Distress
https://doi.org/10.1080/15283488.2014.944696

Paul Paulus and his colleagues have studied individuals and groups as they try to come up with new, creative ideas (often known as brainstorming or ideation). They have found that going back and forth between individual idea generation and group idea generation is more effective than individuals working alone—particularly when the individual thinking session is first.

If you have a group project, think about how you might implement this with your group. If you need to work with an AI to generate ideas (a kind of group project!), think about how to interleave individual thinking with group thinking and how to make sure that individual contributions always precede group thinking. Does alternating thinking practices make a difference in the quality and quantity of your ideas?

Read More
Best practices for brainstorming:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.11.002
More about the science of teamwork:
http://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000334

Challenge: Follow Rachel Baumsteiger’s prosocial intervention steps:

• Learn about prosociality (we did this in class)>
• Elevation—Watch a prosocial story from ESPN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaXVk5GBx-s
• Spend at least a minute each writing about:
• People you admire
• How you would change the world if you could
• 3-5 values (examples: courage, independence, discipline) that are meaningful to you
• Your imagined self in five years in your best possible future—describe what your life would be like
• A plan for how you could help others more over the next week
• Implement your plan. Take notes at the end of each day about how your prosocial actions impacted others. Were you more prosocial?

Read More
A Prosocial Elevation Intervention
https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2019.1639507
Elevation increases tedious helping
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609359882
Elevation makes violence less enjoyable
https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000214

Perception can be trained: People who practice certain video games, who receive intense training in Buddhist meditation, or who engage in immersive visualization during Christian prayer show improved performance on basic visual perception tasks. Notably for this challenge, the Christians who intentionally immersed themselves in a Biblical scene during prayer reported feeling God’s presence more in their daily lives.

Challenge:
In Steps to Christ, Ellen White describes prayer this way: “Prayer is the opening of the heart to God as to a friend. Not that it is necessary in order to make known to God what we are, but in order to enable us to receive Him. Prayer does not bring God down to us, but brings us up to Him.” While praying this week, first read and visualize a passage (such as Ps. 23 or Is. 61:1-3) that provides a scene depicting God’s presence, then pray while visualizing talking to God as to a friend. Does this change your experience?

Read More:
Christian prayer and perception:
https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342090
Buddhist meditation and perception:
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610371339
Video games and perception:
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014345

Even though the firing rate of a single neuron limits its information-carrying capacity, the neurons in our brains work together to allow us to store and process massive amounts of information. One mystery of neuroscience is why human behavior and thought are as slow as if we were running our thoughts on neurons in serial (one after another) rather than in parallel. One possible reason is that human thinking requires comparing and updating many models of the world.

Challenge:
How would your life be different if you respected the slow and limited processing speed of the human mind? Plan a ‘slow moment’ (actually five minutes) to reflect on a memory, count your blessings, or otherwise savor your world. Try your ‘slow moment’ twice every day for a week. See the “Read More” section for the actual intervention with older adults.

Read More:
The paradox of slow human behavior:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.11.008
Many scholars debating a model of a multi-level, multi-timescale, iteratively refining model of the mind:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477
A savoring task (see the Intervention section):
https://doi.org/10.1177/0733464817693375

One way to break the influence of stereotypes on a situation is to make stereotypes less likely to be activated and used as explanations for an individual’s actions. Perspective-taking is a way to break the automatic use of stereotypes as a default explanation.

To take someone else’s perspective, psychological scientists ask people to:

• visualize, read about, or listen to the person whose perspective they are going to take
• either imagine what the other person is currently thinking or
• imagine what they would be thinking if they were that person

Challenge:
Try taking the perspective of somebody from a group who is very different from you. Does this help you think about them as a person rather than a category?

Read More:
A review of perspective taking, including limits on who benefits from perspective taking:
https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12116
Perspective-taking to block racially-biased responses:
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022308