ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY
What worked and What didn't
Vulnerability to anxiety and stress is highly prevalent in children from low-income families. Hence our day 1 session "Anxiety Exploration" is designed with activities to help the students experience what it's like to have anxiety and being under stress as well as how to cope with stress. The goal of this session is to allow the students to have a better understanding of anxiety and be empathetic towards others with anxiety.
2ABNPSY
Reflection of the effectiveness of the activity.
I feel that the activity is ineffective in addressing the mental health issue, anxiety. The goal of the activity, maze distraction is to educate the students on how to empathise with people experiencing anxiety by stimulating the experience of anxiety through the activity.
The activity, stimulate the experience of anxiety by mimicking the stress and worry of anxiety by asking the students to shout out negative phrases when another student is trying to complete a task. However, after conducting a debrief to evaluate the activity, the students stated that they did not feel any form of anxiety or anxiousness from the activity.
I think the main reason why the activity was ineffective in stimulating anxiety was that the task that the students needed to complete while under stress, the maze is too easy for their skills set. According to Robinson and colleagues (2013), to accurately model the impact of anxiety, the stimulation given or provided should be at a level of difficulty that brings slight discomfort to the participants without external influences, the distraction by children.
Hence, If I were to the conduct the activity again, I would recommend changing the task that the students need to complete into a more difficult and challenging one for their skill set, for example, a difficult mathematics question. This way, the students will have a better experience of the stress and anxiety felt when the stress from completing the task is enhanced through the external distraction and comments from the other students.
REFERENCES
Robinson, O. J., Vytal, K., Cornwell, B. R., & Grillon, C. (2013). The impact of anxiety upon cognition: perspectives from human threat of shock studies. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 203. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00203
