Summer 2020 Remote Research

The goal of my study is to examine the relationship between different beliefs or “mindsets” about stress (e.g., stress-is-enhancing; stress-is-debilitating) and the everyday language that people use to talk about their stress. Previous research has concluded that people who are “low in evaluation anxiety” have an easier time completing tasks and gain a heightened understanding of the material (Anderson et al., 2008). We want to use this preliminary research to better understand how college students internalize stress. In other words, is the language people use to talk about stress an indicator of the type of stress mindset they have? While studies have looked at linguistic choices in people who are diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder, there has been minimal to no research that focuses on the general student population in colleges (Jones et al., 2020) To address this question, we will recruit undergraduate students using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and ask them to respond to the following questions: 1) “how would you define stress?” 2) “What are some synonyms for stress, meaning some words or phrases that you use to talk about stress, besides the word “stress”?” 3) “What is the role of stress in your life? How does stress affect you and makes you feel?” We will also ask our participants to complete a survey designed to determine their stress mindset along with other variables including procrastination score, Big 5 Personality trait scores, and perceived stress score (Peterson, 1987). We will then analyze our participants’ responses to determine whether some patterns in their descriptions of stress can help us determine whether these patterns correlate with different stress mindsets. We will be using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to analyze their free-responses: a software that reads text and counts the percentage of words that reflect different emotions, thinking styles, social concerns, and parts of speech.