Washington -- Stress. It is a costly health-related issue in terms of individual performance and well-being, as well as organizational productivity. Now, a new study appearing in the current issue of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Occupational Health Psychology provides education personnel with an effective way to help protect their students from negative stress: 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 give individuals the skills they need to help them resist or cope with negative stress events.

Originally developed for and used in clinical settings to teach people to deal with such negative stress events as pain or phobic reactions, stress inoculation training now is used in a variety of applications and settings. Still at question, however, was just how effective stress inoculation training is, and how widely applicable beyond the clinical setting it might be.

"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.

In today's increasingly competitive education environment, exceptional achievement is the required norm. Test scores and performance on the playing field can have an impact not only on individual students' successful climb up the education ladder, but on community involvement and support for the school, as well as on curricula, staff, and budget decisions.

Students from elementary school age through high school face an array of negative stress events from scoring well on tests to doing well athletically to establishing a niche among friends and peers. How young people cope with these stressors may well determine not only the outcome of the task being performed, but longer-term issues of psychological well-being. Thus, developing or identifying effective interventions for stress reduction has taken on new urgency among educators, including faculty, guidance counselors and school administrators.

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.

5/29/98

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

The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 159,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 50 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 58 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.