SelfhelpMagazine

by Teri Saunders, Ph.D., James E. Driskell, Ph.D., Joan Hall Johnston, Ph.D., & Eduardo Salas, Ph.D.

Stress. It is a costly health-related issue in terms of individual performance and well-being, as well as organizational productivity. A study provides teachers with successful way to help teach child stress management skills in the classroom. The goal is to protect students from negative stress through a model called "stress inoculation training".

Similar to the biomedical inoculation that introduces small amounts of potentially harmful material to enable the body to build resistance, stress inoculation training moves through three distinct phases to teach students skills needed to help resist or cope with negative stress.

A New Approach to Dealing with Child Stress

"The Effect of Stress Inoculation Training on Anxiety and Performance," by psychologists Teri Saunders, Ph.D., James E. Driskell, Ph.D., Joan Hall Johnston, Ph.D., and Eduardo Salas, Ph.D., is a meta analysis of the current literature on stress inoculation training.

The study had two goals: 1) to establish the overall magnitude of effect of stress inoculation training and 2) to examine factors that may increase or decrease the effectiveness of the intervention.

The authors looked specifically at six key moderators that might have an impact on the effectiveness of stress inoculation training: type of population trained (i.e., high-anxious or normal- anxiety), number of training sessions, training setting, type of skills practice, group size and experience of the trainer.

Faculty and guidance personnel can take heart in the findings of this comprehensive study. The authors determined that stress inoculation training is effective outside of strictly clinical environments and can be implemented successfully in individual or group settings with a relatively modest number of training sessions. They also report that stress inoculation training is effective in reducing performance and state anxiety, as well as enhancing performance under stress.

It is important to note, however, that stress inoculation training shows the strongest positive effect on reducing performance anxiety, with slight but decreasing effectiveness in state anxiety and performance improvement.

Reference:

"The Effect of Stress Inoculation Training on Anxiety and Performance" by Teri Saunders, Ph.D., James E. Driskell, Ph.D., Florida Maxima Corporation, Joan Hall Johnston, Ph.D., & Eduardo Salas, Ph.D., U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 170-186.

This information received from the American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC.