Test anxiety remains a challenge for students and has considerable physiological and psychological impacts. The routine practice of slow, Device-Guided Breathing is a major component of behavioral treatments for anxiety conditions. This paper addresses the effectiveness of using DGB as a self-treatment clinical tool for test anxiety reduction. This pilot study sample included 21 healthy men and women, all college students, between the ages of 20 and 30. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups: DGB practice and wait-list control. At (...) the beginning and the end of 3-weeks DGB training, participants underwent a stress test, followed by measures of blood pressure and reported anxiety. Anxiety reduction in the DGB group as compared to controls was not statistically significant, but showed a large effect size. Accordingly, the clinical outcomes suggested that daily practice of DGB may lead to reduced anxiety. We assume that such reduction may lead to improved test performance. Our results suggest an alternative treatment for test anxiety that may also be relevant for general anxiety, which is likely to increase due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The COVID-19 epidemic in the early 2020s is making a big difference for educators around the world. For the past 2 years, the curriculum and working patterns have been overturned in response to this epidemic, which has brought unprecedented challenges and physical and mental stress to preschool teachers. This situation can have a drastic impact on the acquisition of job well-being for preschool teachers. During this special time, the leader’s management style will also influence the psychological feelings of the organization’s (...) staff. For example, empowering leadership is an important management function that empowers subordinates, emphasizes the meaning of work, promotes participation in decision-making, and expresses confidence. Therefore, in the current COVID-19 pandemic context, it is worthwhile to explore the topic of empowering leadership to ensure preschool teachers’ well-being, by balancing work demands and work resources in a way that facilitates a sense of organizational support and reduces job stress, while relatively fewer studies have been conducted on the relationship between preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this, this study proposed a research model from the theoretical perspective of the Job Demands-Resources Model to explore the influence of empowering leadership, sense of organizational support, and job stress on preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve the purpose of this study, a convenience sampling method was used to invite 500 preschool teachers in China to complete a questionnaire survey, and after removing invalid samples and data with incomplete answers, reliability and validity analyses and model fit tests were conducted, followed by a structural equation modeling method for path analysis. The results of the study showed that in the kindergarten work context, empowering leadership showed a significant negative effect on job stress, but a significant positive effect on job well-being and a significant positive effect on sense of organizational support. Sense of organizational support had a significant negative effect on job stress but a significant positive effect on preschool teachers’ job well-being. Preschool teachers’ job stress and job well-being showed a significant negative effect. The contribution of this study was to explore the relationship between understanding leadership empowerment and preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic based on the Job Demands-Resources Model, which will facilitate educational organizational contexts to empower preschool teachers to work harder to reduce their job stress as well as enhance their sense of organizational support and promote the acquisition of job well-being. (shrink)

This study explored the chain-mediating roles of optimism and mental health in the relation of self-directed learning with academic performance among college students in Wuhan during long-term online teaching. In total, 473 valid responses were obtained from students at three Wuhan universities. Self-directed learning, optimism, mental health, and academic performance scales were used as measurement instruments; a 5-point Likert scale was employed for all items. To examine the instruments’ reliability and validity, a measurement model was constructed; moreover, structural models were (...) employed for assessing the chain mediation model. This study confirmed that self-directed learning was a positive predictor of academic performance in Wuhan college students. Optimism and mental health were two mediators and partially jointly mediated the relation of self-directed learning with academic performance. The results revealed that self-directed learning only partially positively predicted academic performance. The aforementioned relationship was partially mediated by optimism and mental health, highlighting the essential roles of optimism and mental health in the learning and learning outcomes of Wuhan college students. (shrink)

The coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic has brought about significant changes in the lifestyle of students. However, despite an extensive study of students’ life stress using a non-comprehensive scale and variable-centered approach, it has been little studied with a comprehensive scale and person-centered approach. Using the Student-Life Stress Inventory-revised (SSI-R), we analyzed students’ latent stress profiles and examined differences in psychological resilience and emotional intelligence by comparing stress profiles from a sample of 418 undergraduate and graduate students (aged 18–36) in various departments of (...) eight universities in Turkey. We identified five distinct stress profiles, defined as an extremely low stress group (ELSG), a low stress group (LSG), a medium stress group (MSG), a high stress group (HSG), and an extremely high stress group (EHSG). We found that (1) MSG and HSG were similar in terms of emotional intelligence, resilience, and possession of high standards, and they reported higher levels of physiological, emotional, and behavioral reactions than ELSG and LSG; (2) MSG felt more pressure than HSG; (3) ELSG reported higher levels of emotional intelligence (wellbeing, self-control, and emotionality) than others. Also, EHSG reported lower levels of emotional intelligence (specifically self-control) than others; (4) whereas resilience was highly positively correlated to wellbeing, resilience and wellbeing were moderately negatively correlated to stress. Extremely low stress group and LSG reported higher levels of resilience than others. Medium stress group, HSG, and EHSG did not differ with regard to resilience and wellbeing. Our results suggest that, university students are able to maintain their functionality by coping up with stress in some ways, no matter how stressful they are. These findings are discussed in relation to the relevant literature. (shrink)

Lonely students typically underperform academically. According to several studies, the COVID-19 pandemic is an important risk factor for increases in loneliness, as the contact restrictions and the switch to mainly online classes potentially burden the students. The previously familiar academic environment, as well as the exchange with peers and lecturers on site, were no longer made available. In our cross-sectional study, we examine factors that could potentially counteract the development of higher education student loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic from a (...) social network perspective. During the semester, N = 283 students from across all institutional faculties of a German comprehensive university took part in an online survey. We surveyed their social and emotional experiences of loneliness, their self-reported digital information-sharing behavior, and their current egocentric networks. Here, we distinguished between close online contacts and close offline contacts. In addition, we derived the interconnectedness and heterogeneity of students’ contacts. To obtain the latter, we used a novel two-step method combining t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding and cluster analysis. We explored the associations of the aforementioned predictors on social and emotional loneliness separately using two hierarchical multiple linear regression models. Our results suggest that social loneliness is strongly related to digital information-sharing behavior and the network structure of close contacts. In particular, high information-sharing behavior, high number of close contacts, a highly interconnected network, and a homogeneous structure of close contacts were associated with low social loneliness. Emotional loneliness, on the other hand, was mainly related to network homogeneity, in the sense that students with homogeneous close contacts networks experienced low emotional loneliness. Overall, our study highlights the central role of students’ close social network on feelings of loneliness in the context of COVID-19 restrictions. Limitations and implications are discussed. (shrink)