The Effect Of Positive And Negative Reinforcement On An Induced Stress Response In University Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionStress in a university setting is known to poorly affect academic performance, increase blood pressure levels, and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. However, the effect of positive and negative reinforcement on students and its ability to induce a stress or physiological response is unknown. The objective of this study is to examine the effects of positive and negative reinforcement on an induced stress response, and how this affects their typing abilities.Methods15 participants (6 male, 9 female) underwent a series of 2 typing tests, with verbal feedback elicited prior to commencing the second test. Participants ages 18 to 22 were recruited from Joseph S. Stauffer Library at Queen’s University and randomly allocated between 3 groups: positive, negative and a control. Blood pressure was measured 5 times across the duration of the 15-minute study for each participant. A one-way ANOVA test was used to identify if there were statistically significant differences between the groups. All analyses were completed using SPSS Version 27.ResultsNegative reinforcement (-11 mmHg) versus control (-5.4 mmHg) elicited a statistically significant increase in systolic blood pressure (SBP) and rate-pressure product (p < 0.05, p < 0.05, respectively). No significant differences were found between groups in typing test scores, diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate. Qualitative analysis determined that negative feedback decreased confidence while increasing performance; positive reinforcement increased both confidence and performance.ConclusionThe study concluded that positive reinforcement should be implemented in university-level courses as it was found to increase typing performance while decreasing SBP.
 Keywords: reinforcement, stress, blood pressure, typing, students
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".