Progress-focused

Stress , the experience or expectation of setbacks in our attempts to achieve goals, is inevitable in professional life. It has both positive and negative effects. Recent research by Alia Crum et al. (2023) shows that we can influence how stress affects us. The key lies in our stress mindset .

In this article I describe new research by David Yeager and his colleagues into how mindsets about abilities and mindsets about stress can reinforce each other, in a positive and negative sense.

Mindsets are important in all areas of our lives. We know the concept of mindset from the work of Carol Dweck . She made the word widely known through her 2006 book . Dweck and her colleagues did a lot of research into the effects of how we think about the malleability of intelligence. But Alia Crum (photo), assistant professor at Stanford University, comes up with a broader definition of the concept of mindset. Her work shows how important our mindset is in about everything we encounter in life. Mindsets play a significant role in our health, our well-being, and our performance. 

- Coert Visser  Gregory M. Walton , associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, does research and teaching focused on wise interventions which target psychological processes involved in individual and major social problems. These wise interventions may shift how people think about themselves and their situations and may help them flourish, even over long periods of time. Recently he co-edited, with Alia Crum , the Handbook of Wise Interventions. How Social Psychology Can Help People Change . We talk about what these wise interventions are. Why use the word ‘wise’ to describe them? What are some examples of these interventions? How can it be that these brief and simple interventions sometimes have such long term benefits?