Most college students get stressed out at times, some even get depressed. I am a student at Franklin & Marshall College and I for one can tell you that I am constantly stressed out. Sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day to go to class, study for exams, write papers, while also trying to salvage your social life. One might assume that it would be the high-achieving college students who would show more distress than low-achieving college students, since they have higher GPAs and therefore must work harder and be under more stress. This argument makes sense, but according to the study “The problem is not learning: Facilitated acquisition of stimulus equivalence classes among low-achieving college students”, this is not exactly the case. Even though all students experience stress, low-achieving students admit to having more distress than their high-achieving counterparts, which in turn leads to avoidance behavior when it comes to academics. This is demonstrated by the results of the study, which show that low-achieving college students are more likely to pair neutral or non-meaningful words or random shapes with emotionally evocative words about academic failure. Neutral words or shapes are even more likely to be associated with the academic failure words when there is a personal reason for the college student. The study compared how high-achieving students performed on the tasks versus how low-achieving college students performed with the prediction that low-achieving college students would perform better than high-achieving students on the academic failure tasks, which presented words about academic failure such as fail, flunk, stupid, or dumb, but worse on the other two non-meaningful tasks that included words about color and shape, such as blue or square.
Imagine that you are a college student who is participating in this study. You are seated in a psychology computer lab and after agreeing to participate in the experiment, you are asked to fill out a series of questionnaires one of which asks for your age, race, and social class and another which asks for you GPA from you last semester. The third questionnaire measures your level of distress by asking questions about different symptoms of anxiety, depression, social roles, etc. and having you rate how often you feel that symptom with a scale from never to almost always. The last questionnaire asks about questions about you academic experience such. For example, one of the questions on the questionnaire was “Do you ever feel completely confused or lost in any of your classes?” The purpose of this questionnaire is to get people to think about academic stressors before they are asked to complete the actual task for the experiment. During computer task one box will appear at the top of a computer screen as well as three at the bottom of the screen and you must choose one of the boxes from the bottom of the screen that best matches the top box. For the first phase, random shapes referred to as category A, were the ones presented at the top of the screen and had to be matched with the correct set of words referred to as category B, at the bottom of the screen. The first random shape, or A1, was matched up with four academic failure words: flunk, fail, stupid, and dumb. A2, another random shape, was paired up with color words: blue, green, red, and yellow. The third random shape, or A3, was “shape” words: square, triangle, rectangle, and circle. In order to move onto the next phase you must pair up all of the random shapes and sets of words correctly. In the second phase, you have to do the same thing only instead of matching the shapes from the “A” category to sets of words you have to match them to other random shapes known as category “C”. Once again, you cannot move to the next phase until you match up the random shapes correctly. The last phase was a mixture of the first two phases where both random pictures from category “C” and sets of words from category “B” are presented, but not the random picture from category “A”. After these three phases, you are tested to see if you form a relationship between the random from the “C” category and the sets of words even though you were never actually asked to pair them up during the phases.
In the actual study 52 college students completed this experiment. The researchers were able to use the GPA’s that students gave in a questionnaire to separate high-achieving students from low-achieving students. The responses to the questionnaires revealed that students with a low-GPA showed a lot more distress than students with high-GPA students who showed less distress. The results also showed that low-achieving students with a low GPA gave more accurate responses to the questions that included academic failure words and were emotionally evocative than high-achieving students with a high GPA, but low-achieving students did worse on the other tasks that included color and shape words. Low-achieving students also had a stronger pattern when responding to the task while high-achieving students’ behavior was less stable. Overall, the results of the study show that people can associate neutral, non-meaningful concepts and situations with those that are emotionally evocative. As a result, the avoidance and escape behavior that tends to go along with emotionally evocative situations can be transferred to the non-meaningful situations as well thus causing the same avoidance and escape behavior to also occur for the non-meaningful stimuli. This tendency for students, especially low-achieving students, to associate negative aspects of emotionally evocative situations to situations that were originally neutral can have dire effects on their psychological health, such as an increase in distress, anxiety or depression, all of which would have a negative effect on their academics.
All students do this to some extent. For instance, although I excelled in English and History classes, match has always been my weakness. It all began with Algebra, no matter how hard I worked I could never receive an A as my final grade, I managed to receive B’s and B+’s, but I felt like I was working twice as hard as other students to achieve those grades. The following year I went into Pre-calculus and immediately had the same feelings of anxiety that Algebra used to give me despite the fact that I have never actually taken Pre-Caluculus before. By associating my negative feelings toward Algebra with other math classes math in general became a stressful subject for me even though initially it was only Algebra that was the problem. Had I known at the time about the results of this study I could have consciously tried to prevent myself from becoming anxious in all math classes just because Algebra gave me such a tough time.
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