MindCraft Challenges

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

In many everyday settings, the default choice is to simply experience negative emotions as they arise, rather than attempting to reappraise them. Gaurav Suri and his colleagues noted that when the default is ‘do nothing’, people only try to reappraise in a lab task only 16% of the time.

Challenge: Try a day of reappraisal. You will try to change your default by leaving yourself “reappraise!” messages (notes in your room and car, a sticky note or home screen on your phone, etc.). Any time you experience a negative event throughout the day, you will try to follow the reappraisal instruction. Because Suri and his colleagues found that there was the possibility that reappraisal instructions might also have a small effect on the likelihood of reappraisal, you should read this handout with descriptions of how to do two kinds of reappraisal.

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Defaults predict whether reappraisal will happen
https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000011
Instructions for two kinds of reappraisal
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01173-x

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!

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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