Anxiety And Learning Anxiety

AbstractThe paper summarizes a single-system design aimed at improving the participant's score on the Clinical Assessment of Anxiety through the intervention of meditative breathing. A baseline of three weeks was measured followed by four weeks of treatment phase. During the treatment phase, the participant completed meditative breathing exercise three times daily for five days each week. The participant completed the Clinical Assessment of Anxiety each Friday of the treatment phase. The results indicated improvement in the scores, however the participant's score never got below the clinical cutting score of 30.

To address this phenomenon, researchers have proposed different theories of test anxiety to account for the effects of test anxiety on the deficits of academic performance. According to scholars such as Schmidt and Riniolo (1999), the cognitive aspects of test anxiety - worry and task-relevant thinking - are also present in social anxiety. Therefore, students who experience test anxiety may also suffer from other types of psychological and cognitive problems such as self-esteem, cognitive development, social skills and memory. Essentially, the students who suffer from test anxiety are individuals who are unable to cope with any types of stress. Considering the stressful nature of

Adolescence is a difficult time period in a young person’s transition into their later stage of both physical and mental development. Mood disorders are often overlooked during this time for the brain becoming more developed; however among children, anxiety disorders seem to be the most common disorders to be experienced (Nelson; Israel, pg 112). Barlow (2002) defines anxiety as a future-oriented emotion that is characterized by the inability to be in control and predict future events that can be potentially dangerous to the individual. Anxiety shares commonalities with fear, but the difference between the two being that fear is the initial response made from a present threat, where anxiety is due to a unknown future event. A common

The secret lies in being able to gain control over your thoughts. Mindfulness has been shown to lower anxiety and stress as well as the fatigue that it causes. Over time, it has also been shown to improve memory (which is often negatively affected by anxiety) and improve reaction times.

Participants underwent a screening process to ensure eligibility and were then randomly assigned to a treatment, or a control group. Those in the worry exposure group were trained to listen to one worry image at a time for 20-30 minutes and use a 0-100 SUDS scale to measure anxiety. Students placed in the expressive writing group were told to write about their academic worry in detail for 20 minutes per session. Audio-photic stimulation was administered through headphones for 35 minutes at a time, and programmed for worry reduction. The participants continued this for one month before being evaluated again for pathological academic stress.

To experience any form of anxiety, such as interviews, a drive in traffic, or even a first date is a natural- human experience. For instance, one begins to undergo a feeling of failure regarding specific class. Nevertheless, sometimes, the emotion, keeps us motivated and school work-orientated. Yet, now and then, anxiety can take a hold on one when intense fear and distress becomes too overwhelming; it can prevent one from doing everyday thing. As a result, anxiety disorder can be the cause (B. T. Anxiety Disorders, 2016). According to National Alliance of Mental Illness, known as NAMI (2016), anxiety disorders are a common mental health concern in the United States. Roughly, forty million adults in the United States, and eight percent of children and teenagers face some sort of a negative impact of an anxiety disorder. Consequently, people develop symptoms of anxiety disorder before the age twenty-one.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (2016) about 6% of children in the United States suffer from a severe anxiety disorder. Other studies cite figures closer to 10% of children being affected by extreme anxiety disorders (Girling-Butcher & Ronan, 2009). While figures may vary slightly, there is no doubt that a large number of school-aged children grapple with a disorder that can disrupt and damage their functioning in schools and social situations. Chiu et al. (2013) state that anxious children can also suffer from “high rates of school refusal, poor academic performance and impairments in school functioning” (p. 142).

Fourteen women in the program participated in an activity that assess their preparedness for leaving treatment. The women were given a pretest and post-test to assess their anxiety level on Monday, November 24, 2017. This assessment lasted approximately 50 minutes. Before the assessment started, the researcher had the participants fill out some demographic questions, sign consent form, and completed the pretest GAD -7. The assessment began with some quick psycho –education on the topic of meditation and discussion among the group about the topic of meditation.

According to the article, meditation can ease depression, anxiety and other psychological stressors, all issues that can negatively impact a child’s academic performance. With that said, since a majority of the students at Robert W. Coleman come from high-stress environments, meditation has done wonders. Therefore, the Mindful Meditation Room creates an environment where students are able of decompressing while also enhancing their ability to learn.

Goh, Grace. (2015). School based intervention for test anxiety. Child and youth care forum, 45(1), 1-17. doi:10.1007/510566-015-9314-1.

Meditation means to concentrate and connect with ones’ own mind, to explore identity and emotions in order to be aware of conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious thoughts. Meditation originates and has been has been practiced in Asia for thousands of years for different reasons such as increasing concentration abilities, religious purposes and also to train the mind. This essay will focus on how meditation affects brain plasticity (ability to change), emotionally and intellectually, leading to better performance and coping abilities in stressful situations. Things like attention span, memory functions and complexity of emotions will be further explored and may interest the reader since meditation can answer many questions on improving mental health that affects almost everyone. I will make the claim that meditation practice needs to be introduced early into educational institutions such as schools. Because evidence suggests that that meditation increases the volume of the cortex in the brain, leading to a higher and more powerful emotional intellect and cognition that improves things like memory, attention and emotional control. It is logical to assume that in order to alter thickness of cortex, mental thought functions and emotional strength, meditation should be introduced to children early in school for greater performance.

Children and adolescents in the United States face different psychological challenges, such as anxiety disorders, depression, attention deficit disorder, as well as many other psychiatric diagnoses (Bloom, Dey, & Freeman, 2006). The prevalence rate of children diagnosed with a mental disorder is alarming. According to Merikangas et al. (2010), 22.2% of American children and adolescents get diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder that is severe enough to impair their ability to attend school and learn (Bucci, Marques, Oh, & Harris, 2016). Kids that are plagued by various psychological illnesses may experience a difficult time concentrating and staying focused in school. Additionally, the over-accumulation of toxic stress, either due to the pressures of schools or environmental (i.e., difficult exams, poverty, household dysfunction, etc.), can have negative and detrimental effects during childhood, as well as adulthood (Bucci et al., 2016).

This is an article that specifically looks at anxiety in the school setting for adolescents. This article starts off with a story of a girl named Samantha. Samantha is a fourteen year old student that has test taking anxiety. She feels sweaty and would see the nurse daily because of her anxiousness. The article talks about the case of Samantha being common with many students in school. The article then goes into the different characteristics such as worry. Anxiety can manifest in three different ways: behaviorally, physiologically, and cognitively. Many different behaviors that children exhibit because of anxiety are reflected their attempts to control their anxiety. When discussing anxiety, there are different causes of anxiety and

Also the retest-reliability of the Interaction Anxiousness Scale (IAS; Leary, 1983) is .80. “The correlation coefficient of the IAS and Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SAD; Peng et al., 2004) is 0.66, whereas it is 0.29 for the Self-rating Anxiety Scale.” Although the IAS was very valid, it did not cover all factors of social anxiety of the Tibetan, Han, and Muslim college students in Qinghai Province. Another limitation was the stratified random sampling that they used in their study. Representations of this study are unclear because of this method of sampling is random and simple. This sampling method should be paired with other sampling methods to make this study more effective and representations more clear. A further limitation was time and capacity therefore limiting the researchers. They did not consider situational factors effect anxiety in their studies on the students. Furthermore they only studied students of Tibetan, Han, and Muslim ethnicity so the result may not be generalized to other

Social Anxiety causes poor academic performance and high levels of academic anxiety can negatively affect working memory (Owens, Stevenson, Hadwin, & Norgate, 2012). This disables the student to pay attention to the lesson properly. Students with this disorder have weaker student teacher relationship, and therefore can cause conflicts, and less of a desire for a teacher to help that student. (Volbrechet 2010).