Social Skills Study

 Students' social skills and emotional maturity have declined at least somewhat during the coronavirus pandemic, according to most educators who responded to a recent survey. Educators say that in some cases they have observed students withdrawing or acting out.

Educators see gaps in kids' emotional growth due to pandemic. (2022). Eduncaton Week Research Center. 

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/educators-see-gaps-in-kids-emotional-growth-due-to-pandemic/2022/02

High school students' emotions study

When researchers  asked more than 21,678 U.S. high school students to say how they typically felt at school, nearly 75 percent of their answers were negative. "Tired" topped the list, followed by "bored" and "stressed," with positive words like "happy" distantly following.Students reported feeling boredom and stressed, but in the moment they reported feeling calm, happy, and relaxed even more often. What didn't change was the one "feeling" the researchers hadn't expected at all: Students overwhelmingly reported feeling tired. It was the only feeling consistently named by more than half of the students. The study also found that boys and girls tended to experience school differently. Girls reported more negative feelings than boys overall, and in the moment, girls were much more likely to say they were stressed. As of 2016 the National Sleep Foundation found that 87 percent of high school students in the United States sleep significantly less than the recommended 8 to 10 hours per night. And on the heels of the Yale study, another in the journal Molecular Psychiatry also found that even preteen students who got insufficient sleep had higher rates of anxiety, depression, impulsive behavior, and poor cognitive performance. 
Moeller, J. et al.  (2020).  High school students' feelings. Learning & Instruction, 66 (April).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2019.101301

Playtime and mental health studies

Rates of anxiety and depression among teens in the U.S. have been rising for years. According to one study, nearly one in three adolescents (ages 13-18) now meets the criteria for an anxiety disorder, and in the latest results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 32 percent of teens reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. "Kids are play-deprived nowadays, that is, playing without screens or supervision. These days free play is on the decline,  and so are the social and emotional skills that come with it. Part of the problem is parents who worry that unsupervised play is just too risky. Kids should be in the driver's seat, learning to manage their work, their time and, ideally, being able to pursue their own interests. That freedom  helps them develop internal motivation in a way that rewards and grades just can't.

Youth risk behavior survey. (2017). Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/trendsreport.pdf
Merikangas, K., et al. (2011). Lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in US adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 49(10), 980-989. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946114/

Emotions and Cognitive Functioning

This column by the Hechinger Report examined both current and past research on the topic of the relationship between affect and cognition. Potential implications in the classroom are covered, including deficits and advantages to classroom learning dependent on students’ moods.

1.) Emotions such as feeling sad or happy may affect how students learn, asserts researcher Caitlin Mills, who co-authored a recent study on the topic. This study found that watching something aimed at inducing feelings of sadness yielded better reading comprehension than watching something intended to make viewers feel happy. In this study, the most significant finding was that the sad group outperformed the happy group on deep-reasoning questions.

Mills, C., Wu, J., & D’Mello, S. (2017). Being sad is not always bad: The influence of affect on expository text comprehension. Dicsourse Processes, 20(1). https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2017.1381059

2.) This study, which examined the relationship between mood and global versus local visual processing, found that individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to use an accessible global concept to guide attempts to reproduce a drawing from memory. Individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to classify figures on the basis of global features.

Gasper, K. & Clore, G. L. (2002). Attending to the big picture: Mood and global versus local processing of visual information. Psychological Science, 13(1), 34-40. httpsL//dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00406

3.) This paper, which examined the relationship between feeling and thinking as well as between affect and cognition, reviewed the traditional and current psychological theories linking affect to social thinking and behavior. The results found that negative affect promotes a more accommodative, vigilant, and externally focused thinking strategy. The important of these findings is evident through enhancing research on affect-cognition theories. The practical implications of negative affect promoting improved social thinking and performance in a number of fields is examined.

Forgas, J. P. (2017). Can sadness be good for you? Australian Psychol, 52(1), 3–13. doi:10.1111/ap.12232. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ap.12232