Before picking up the pencil to begin trying to get through that
murky biochemistry midterm, thinking about an important personal
value can alleviate the feeling of impending doom, according to a
new UCLA-led study.
The study of 80 UCLA undergraduate students shows that when
people focus on positive self-affirmations prior to a stressful
events, they can decrease the adverse effects of stress.
These self-affirmations can range from social values to religion
to politics. Some students may think about their families while
others may choose to simply think about their own personal
attributes.
“It’s really impressive because (the
self-affirmations) really buffered the stress responses that the
students had,” said David Creswell, lead UCLA researcher and
advanced graduate student in the department of psychology.
The subjects in the study underwent two potentially stressful
events. First they had to deliver a five-minute speech explaining
why they would make good administrative assistants in the
psychology department based on their good qualities. The students
were then asked to subtract from the number 2,083 by 13s.
In both cases, the students had to complete the tasks in front
of a pair of panelists. The panelists were instructed to
non-supportively tell the students to continue when they paused, to
start over if they incorrectly subtracted, or to go faster.
The participants were split into two groups and asked to rank
their top five values prior to speaking to the panelists.
The value-affirmation group filled out a questionnaire
pertaining to the value they ranked as most important to them,
while the control group filled out a questionnaire about their No.
5-ranked value.
Throughout the session, the researchers measured salivary
cortisol levels, heart rate and blood pressure. The students who
thought about their self-affirmations prior to the panel
presentations had lower cortisol levels than the control group.
Cortisol is a hormone that the body releases when under physical
or psychological stress, and is involved in the regulation of blood
pressure. Cortisol leads to an increase of glucose production and
the increase in blood sugar levels in the brain so that the body is
adequately equipped with energy to deal with stressors.
David Sherman, professor in the UC Santa Barbara department of
psychology, performed a similar study in which sexually active
students were asked to view a video on AIDS education.
Students who completed a self-affirmation questionnaire prior to
the viewing saw themselves at greater risk for HIV and were more
likely to participate in activities such as purchasing condoms than
students who did not.
“The psychological immune system is a metaphor for the
psychological processes that people use to shield themselves from
different threats, and self-affirmation is a part of this,”
Sherman said. “When people reflect on their important values,
they tend to be less defensive in response to different types of
threats.”
The results of the study did not vary among students who picked
different affirmations as being most important to them.
Creswell said as long as the values they picked were important
to the students, it didn’t matter what those values were.
“The students really weren’t aware of doing a
self-affirmation activity because the questionnaire had them think
of the value in a subtle way,” he added.
This indirect method of engaging the students in thinking about
their self-affirmations was enough to decrease stress levels,
Creswell said.
The researchers also studied the effects of self-affirmation in
breast cancer patients.
The patients were asked to write essays, and those who wrote
more self-affirming essays had better health.
“This, to our knowledge, is the first study (of this kind)
that has shown effects (of stress) on biology,” said Shelley
Taylor, professor in the UCLA department of psychology.
“This is actually the kind of stress-management technique
that almost anyone can do anywhere. You can do it while waiting for
the subway or bus or just before an exam … because it’s
successful and because it’s so easy to do once you get the
hang of it, you can do it whenever you are stressed out,” she
said.