Stress… Everyone knows its bad. Flight and Fight responses were designed for short bursts of time, enough to escape that saber tooth tiger and that was all. We’d all be better off without stress, but the college student knows how stress occurs during the aptly name “dead week”, the week before finals.

Take this Headline:

“Short-term stress can affect learning and memory”

A study at UC Irvine has found evidence to support the theory that acute stress has a negative impacts on cell-communication in memory formation.

The study sounds boring, but none of us can avoid stress. And haven’t you ever been so stressed its hard to remember a thing? In Psychology, we talk about an optimum performance curve. This curve talks about ‘optimum performance” with intermediate arousal. Its a bell curve and can be better explained in terms of tests.

Theres a final coming up in psych and Johnny, Mary and Alex are all gonna take it. Johnny is really relaxed. He thinks he can take the test, so he doesn’t study. Mary is beside herself with worry so she can’t even sleep and is having trouble studying. Alex is nervous, and studying hard for the test.

According to the curve, Johnny is not aroused enough, Mary is too aroused, but Alex is in the middle of the curve with intermediate arousal and so optimum performance is expected.

Extreme stress is what I think of as too aroused. So we come back to it. Stressing out is bad, so if Scientists can learn how we are affected, perhaps eventually steps can be taken to lessen the negative impacts of stress.

To read more about the study, go to :
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uoc–ssc031008.php