RESEARCH LINES
Investigation of how student motivation & health is affected by other people
Current research lines
Competing Against Others
Students can find themselves competing against peers across the nation for high scores on standardized tests, vying for scholarships and college admissions, or simply competing with classmates for top grades.
My research seeks to understand and help students perform their best under the stress of competition.
Motivation during competition
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Students respond differently to competition, some become more approach-oriented and risk-taking while others become more avoidance-oriented and cautious (Hangen, Elliot, & Jamieson, 2016).
Adopting competitive goals
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Although trying to do better than others is associated with better performance and trying to avoid doing worse than others is associated with worse performance, not all individuals recognize the difference between these two goals (Hangen, Elliot, & Jamieson, 2019a).
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The confusion about these two competitive goals can be corrected with the help of short reading materials. This corrective solution leads to goal measurements that are better at predicting outcomes (Hangen, Elliot, & Jamieson, 2019b).
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Whom a person is competing against can affect the type of competitive goals they adopt (Elliot, Weissman, Hangen, & Thorstenson, 2021).
Stereotypes & Expectations from Others
Students face expectations for their academic performance that are implied by gender and racial stereotypes or expressed by their parents and teachers.
These actual or perceived expectations can have a measurable impact on student motivation, performance, and well-being.
High Academic Expectations from Parents
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The High Expectations for Academic Performance (HEAP) scale was developed and scores were validated in a college student sample to measure 3 different types of high academic expectations college students perceive their parents hold: 1) parents' belief in their ability to earn top grades, 2) parents' predictions that they will earn top grades, and 3) parents' demands that they earn top grades (Hangen, Elliot, & Jamieson, 2024).
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College students who believe their parents demand that they earn A's have heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and worry and perform worse than their classmates. In contrast, college students who believe their parents think they have the ability to earn A's or predict that they will earn A's, generally did not show any increase in anxiety nor depression and oftentimes performed better than their classmates (Hangen, Elliot, & Jamieson, in prep).
Downsides to both negative and positive stereotypes
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When informed that an upcoming math task has been shown to produce gender differences, female participants perform worse than female participants who were informed that a math task has not been shown to produce gender differences, despite being skeptical of the instructions. Additionally, participants who were told that no gender differences exist on the math task perceived the experimenter as holding the belief that gender differences existed on the task, which suggests that stereotype threat performance detriments might not be due to perceptions of the experimenter's beliefs but perhaps anticipation that diagnostic analyses of gender differences will be conducted (Seitchik & Hangen, in prep).
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In addition to the downsides of negative stereotypes (e.g. "Women are bad at math"), I am currently examining challenge and threat stress responses to positive racial stereotypes for academic performance (e.g. “Asians and Asian-American students are good at math”) in the interest of developing a more comprehensive model of the effects of stereotypes on student motivation (Ongoing project)
Student learning is frequently evaluated (via exams, tests, assignments, etc.) and such evaluation commonly elicits stress responses. Although chronic stress is unhealthy, short-term acute stress does not have to be. Stress reappraisal is a coping strategy that elicits healthy and adaptive acute stress responses.
Countering traditional wisdom that the best performance occurs when one is relaxed, stress reappraisal encourages individuals to embrace their body's physiological stress reaction as a signal that their body is providing coping resources that can enhance their performance.
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A stress reappraisal intervention was successfully implemented in a double-blind classroom study. Community college students taking a remedial math course who read materials on the benefits of stress performed better on their mathematics exam than their peers who received placebo materials (Jamieson, Peters, Greenwood, & Altose, 2016).
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In a mathematics competition, stress reappraisal materials elicited greater challenge-like stress responses and facilitated performance for male participants (Hangen, Elliot, & Jamieson, 2019c).
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The beneficial physiological effects of stress reappraisal not only benefit the individual, but have been found to elicit partner effects in a teammate (Oveis, Gu, Ocampo, Hangen, & Jamieson, 2020).