Word: stress
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says. "The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night, the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record ... What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event...
Knox's measured explanation of her sometimes bizarre behavior in the hours and days after the murder certainly helped her defense. What the press called "cartwheels" in the police station during questioning, she explained as stress-reducing yoga; she said photographs of her making out with Sollecito in the yard outside the cottage as police inspected the murder scene simply reflected her state of "shock" and his efforts to console her with "cuddling." (Read a story about the Italian media's obsession with the Knox case...
...different versions of the SAT reasoning test given on three consecutive Saturday mornings. The tests would take three-and-a-half hours, four-and-a-half hours and five-and-a-half-hours, and would be administered in a random order to each of the students. To boost the stress level in the students - who had already taken the SAT in the past and gotten into college - Ackerman and Kanfer offered a cash bonus to any volunteers who beat their high-school score. (See pictures of a public boarding school...
When the researchers scored the results, it came as no surprise that volunteers' fatigue and stress rose steadily as the test got longer. What was unexpected was their corresponding performance: as the length of the test increased, so did the students' scores. The average score on the three-and-a-half hour test was 1,209 out of 1,600. On the four-and-a-half-hour version it was 1,222; on the five-and-a-half-hour test it was 1,237. Virtually all of the students followed that pattern...
...scores marched higher all the same. What the researchers believe explains the improvement is fatigue - or more precisely, what the fatigue represents. A feeling of exhaustion is often a stand-in for anxiety. Most students - particularly comparatively high achievers who have already gotten into college - learn to use the stress that accompanies a test as a prod to action and concentration. The experts call the phenomenon "achievement motivation," or a kind of competitive energy spurt...