Daily Work, Nonwork, and Stress Experiences of Students

A substantial body of literature exists that examines work, nonwork, and stress in employed adults. Less is known about experiences of stress in adolescents and emerging adults. The goal of the present study is to examine the association between daily activities and next day stress within a sample of students. We propose that students use their personal resources to meet school demands, and then need to replenish those resources, or stress may ensure. One aim of this study is to examine the relationship of hours of exercise and sleep with students’ reports of stress the next day. Additionally, many students maintain employment. This study will also address the association of employment with the relationships between sleep, exercise, and stress in students. We hypothesize that 1) on days when participants exercise, stress will be decreased the next day, 2) on days when participants sleep more, stress will be decreased the next day, and 3) these relationships will be weakened a) when students are employed and b) on days following a workday. Participants were undergraduate students and adolescents, aged 14 to 21. Over seven days, participants reported stress and the time spent daily on exercise, sleep, and work. Multilevel regression analyses will be conducted to examine the within-person effects of exercise and sleep on stress, in addition to whether the between-person variable of employment and the within-person variable of workday moderates these associations. Results from this study will inform future stress interventions at both the school and organizational level

Math matters during a pandemic: A novel, brief educational intervention combats whole number bias to improve health decision-making and predicts COVID-19 risk perceptions and worry across 10 days

At the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception--whole number bias (WNB)--contributed to incorrect beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a novel, five-minute online educational intervention, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science research, to encourage accurate COVID-19 and flu fatality rate calculations and comparisons. As predicted, adults (N = 1,297) randomly assigned to the intervention were more likely to correctly answer health decision-making problems and were less likely to report WNB errors in their problem-solving strategies relative to control participants. There were no immediate effects of condition on COVID-19 risk perceptions and worry; however, those in the intervention group did exhibit increased perceived risk and worry across 10 days of daily diaries. The intervention did not cause distress; instead, it increased positive affect. Ameliorating WNB errors could impact people’s risk perceptions about future health crises