With the return of examinations in Summer 2022, this blog series hears a range of expert voices who share their insight and advice covering wellbeing approaches for students and teachers in an often uncertain post-pandemic world. Read our series ‘Looking after students and staff wellbeing during exam season’ Part One: Thomas Michael, a Safeguarding and […]
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You can find lots of great advice and practical support for students and parents on our A Level hub ! Skin problems, skin anxiety and psychological stress are extremely common in teenage years and are closely interlinked. How does this all work? Skin conditions are very complex and lots of factors play a role. The hormones we produce when […]
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Professor Chris Kyriacou I have spent more than 30 years teaching about and doing research on what constitutes ‘effective’ teaching. Over the years I have become more and more convinced that the key to being a successful teacher, both in terms of the quality of learning you promote, and in terms of maintaining your own […]
Read moreHeavy rain and storm surges have made 2014 pretty miserable for many of us (so far), and have been devastating for many of those affected by the widespread flooding in southern parts of the UK. What are the psychological impacts of flooding like this? The Health Protection Agency (HPA) published a document in 2012 […]
Read moreA team of Californian researchers, led by Susan Charles, recently published a study linking daily hassles to depression ( Charles et al., 2013 ). A group of just over 700 participants were studied for eight consecutive days. On each day they reported daily hassles and also how negative they were feeling. Ten years later the same participants were re-assessed. […]
Read moreYou will have heard of the nature-nurture debate. In the last decade researchers have come to a deeper understanding of how the two interact. The field is called epigenetics and there is an interesting example of this in the link between stress and attachment. Research has shown that rats who have been raised by mothers […]
Read moreHere’s an interesting application of understanding stress. People who have spinal injuries usually lose control of their autonomic nervous system as well as their limbs, which means that their bodies do not respond to stress signals from the brain in the same way that normal people do – ‘normally’ an athlete, at the start of […]
Read moreA recent study by Ramona Scotland (just published ) is described on a recent edition of Healthcheck (listen here ). The study did involve animals but points clearly to significant gender differences – females have stronger immune systems which means they become less ill and recover faster. There is a downside because women are also more susceptible […]
Read moreWomen in our culture generally have richer social networks than men, and this observation has been used as part of the explanation for women coping better with stress and living longer. Now a meta-analysis has shown that a low number of friends, family, colleagues etc. in a person’s social network has similar negative effects on […]
Read moreThere really are some beautiful charts and diagrams here …. truly ‘descriptive statistics’. I can’t really do any of it justice by cramming it into a tiny blog post, but it’s well worth having a look at this venn diagram about drugs, for example. Or this interactive representation of the link between stress and work.
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