LinkBlog
6 Golden Rules for Conquering Performance Anxiety by David Leisner
Freedom from Fear's On Target Summer/Fall 2007 newsletter - an anxiety & depression resource (PDF)
Switching between monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) and SSRI or tricyclic antidepressants (.doc format)
Switching between tricyclic, SSRI and related antidepressants (.doc format)
blog roll
- Agoraphobia
- Anxiety 2 Calm
-
Anxious Living : An Exploration
into Social Anxiety - Dare to Dream
- Dear Tobacco
-
Dr. Deborah Serani's:
Psychological Perspectives - Fast Weight Loss?
- Finding the Confidence
- GNIF Brain Blogger
- Legacy of War
- Mental Health Minutes
- My Brain: My Friend, My Enemy
- My Wife Has Agoraphobia!
- Neurophilosophy
- PTSD Combat
- The Happiness Guy
- The Last Psychiatrist
- The Trouble With Spikol
-
WebMD: Anxiety and
Stress Management - We Worry: A Blog for the Anxious
recommended links
Depression Is Real Coalition
-
ABIL: Agoraphobics Building
Independant Lives -
Agoraphobia and Panic
Disorder Foundation -
Anxiety Disorders Association
of America - Anxiety Network Australia
- Anxiety-Panic.Com
- AnxietyZone
- Army Behavioral Health
- BrainPhysics - OCD
-
Canadian Network for Mood
and Anxiety Treatments - Children of Hoarders
- Choices in Mental Health (UK)
-
Dart Foundation: Gateway to PTSD
information -
David Baldwin's
Trauma Information Pages - EMDR Institute, Inc.
- EMDR Network Japan
- Fear of Flying course (free)
- Healthy Minds
- Information for People with Anxiety Disorders
- Internet Guide to REBT, CBT
- Living with a Brain Disorder
- Morita Therapy
- Mayo Clinic : Depression
- Mayo Clinic : GAD
- Mayo Clinic : OCD
- Mayo Clinic : Panic Attacks
- Mayo Clinic : PTSD
- Mayo Clinic : Social Anxiety
-
Medicines.org.uk - Anxiety &
Depression guides - Mind-Your-Mind Canada
- National Center for PTSD
-
National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) - No Such Thing As Crazy
- OCD Action, UK
- OCD Ireland
- Obsessive Compulsive Foundation
- Open Minds, Open Doors
- Paniccure.com
- Partners With PTSD
- Prescription Drug Information
- Psychiatric Service Dog Society
- PsychNews
-
Rational Emotive Behavior
Therapy (REBT) - Sane Australia
-
Shyness & Social Anxiety
Service of Australia -
Social Phobia/Social Anxiety
Association - Social Anxiety Support board
-
South African Depression &
Anxiety Group - Suicide Prevention Help
-
tAPir - the Anxiety Panic
internet resource -
The Panic Center (Free
CBT based programs) - The School of OCD
- UN-WHO Drug Trials Database
- U.S. Army Behavioral Health - PTSD
"just don't smoke"
Yul Brynner
- Menthol cigarettes harder to quit
- Secondhand smoke in cars serious threat to kid's health
- Starting smoking young increases addiction risk
-
Smoking doesn't slim girls;
stunts boys' growth - 40 reasons why you should quit smoking
- Pregnant smokers 'prime' their kids to smoke
- Smoking related coronary artery disease quickly reversed if young smokers quit
- Not ready to quit? Try cutting back
- Half smoking again within year of lung cancer surgery
- Cutting back 'compensation' increases toxin load per cigarette
- Tobacco companies upped nicotine level 11% since 1998
- Workplace passive smoke increases lung cancer risk
- Hooked by genes: The DNA sequences cigarette companies love
- Smoking causes long lasting changes to brain's bio chemistry
- Nicotine receptor stimulant trebles the odds of stopping smoking
- Bupropion, nortriptyline double chances of quitting
- Nicotine's powerful role in reinforcing smoking
- Pregnant smokers raise child's risk of stroke, heart attack
- Smoking linked to pancreatic cancer
- Neurobiology of Smokers' Cravings
- 'Low cancer risk' cigarettes as deadly as regular kind
- Quitting reduces lung cancer death risk by 70%
- Fetal nicotine exposure linked to teen attention problems
- Outdoor second-hand smoke exposure can harm
- Response to day's first cigarette predicts ease of quitting
- 'Healthy' children of smoking parents aren't really so healthy
- Children of smokers have up to five times higher levels of a nicotine toxin
- Smoking increases risk of dementia
- Smoking kills even after quitting
- Antenatal second hand smoke exposure increases child's psychological problems
- Smoking could kill 1 billion this century: WHO
- Just 1 cigarette can lead to nicotine addiction
- Smokers less likely to survive early stage lung cancer
- Smokeless tobacco delivers carcinogens more efficiently than cigarettes!
anti torture campaign
- Torture experts write APA policy
- [APA] still rocked by torture debate
- Petition for psychologists
- AMA president says APA "did not accurately represent our ethical guidelines"
- Psychologists Aiding Torturers
-
Annual conference endorses
APA's torture policy :( - Physicians for Human Rights call on Congress to vote No on Military Commissions Bill
-
Torture is a Form of Trauma;
Trauma Causes PTSD - Psychoanalysts' association condemns torture use
- Humiliating, inhumane or degrading treatment IS torture
- Two American psychologists accused of war crimes. U.S. DoD investigating.
- DoD report proves psychologists central to POW/detainee abuse (pdf)
- 40 psychologists demand APA change policy on torture (pdf)
- Did the American Psychological Association turn a blind eye to torture for medicine precribing rights?
- Will psychologists still abet torture?
Deputy Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Lt. General John (Jeff) Kimmons, has stated that no actionable intelligence had been obtained through abusive interrogation methods in the last 5 years.
monument, Monmouth County
New Jersey.
Talented people more likely to wilt under pressure
Talented people often choke under pressure because the distraction caused by stress consumes their working memory, a psychologist at the University of Chicago has found.
Highly accomplished people tend to heavily rely on their abundant supply of working memory and are therefore disadvantaged when challenged to solve difficult problems, such as mathematical ones, under pressure, according to research by Sian Beilock, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her findings were presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
People with less adequate supplies of working memory learn other ways of problem solving to compensate for their deficiencies and although these alternative problem solving strategies are not highly accurate, they are not impacted additionally by working under pressure, the research found.
Beilock found that when put under pressure, the talented people with larger amounts of working memory began using short-cuts to solve problems, such as guessing and estimation, strategies similar to those used by individuals with less adequate working memories. As a result of taking those shortcuts, the accuracy of the talented people was undermined.
"These findings suggest that performance pressure harms higher working memory individuals by consuming the cognitive resources that they rely on for their superior performance - and as a result, higher working memory individuals respond by switching to the less accurate problem solving strategies normally used by lower working memory students," Beilock said.
The results have implications for the evaluation of performance on high stakes tests, such as those needed to advance in school and college entrance examinations, she said.
Working memory is a short-term memory system that maintains a limited amount of information in an active state. It functions by providing information of immediate relevance while preventing distractions and irrelevant thoughts from interfering with the task at hand.
People with a high level of working memory depend on it heavily during problem solving. "If you've got it, flaunt it" Beilock said.
However, that same advantage makes them particularly susceptible to the dangers of stress.
"In essence, feelings of pressure introduce an intrusion that eats up available working memory for talented people," Beilock said.
In order to study the impact of stress on working memory, Beilock and her colleagues tested roughly 100 college undergraduates. They gave them tests to determine the strength of their working memory and then subjected them to a series of complicated, unfamiliar mathematics problems.
Students were given pressure by being told they would be paid for their correct answers, but that they would only receive the money if a partner, chosen randomly who they did not know, would also win. Then they were told that their partner had solved the problem correctly, thus increasing the pressure.
The study showed that as a result of the pressure, the performance of students with strong working memory declined to the same level as those with more limited working memory. Those with more limited working memory performed as well under added pressure as they did without the stress.
Beilock SL.
Choking in Math: Most Qualified To Succeed = Most Likely To Fail
Presentation: AAAS Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. 2007 Feb 17
Very interesting. This is my own experience during some math exams as an undergraduate, especially in difficult senior courses. (I'm doing a ph.d. in math now.) I could do extremely well on difficult problem set material assigned throughout a course, and usually relished the challenges, but would frequently choke on tests. Stress and anxiety would lead to semi-panics when confronted with something out of the ordinary - sometimes even something ordinary - on a test, and that would essentially destroy my performance on the whole test. Definitely I would experience memory impairment, as well as impairment of my usual analytical thought processes.
In contrast, when I had to write one of my ph.d. comprehensive exams on a day's notice, I performed well. At that particular time I was on Effexor and I believe that as a result my anxiety level was kept in check sufficiently that the stress did not interfere. Rather it was kept at a level which was beneficial. (Some stress is good.)