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  1. Aquí podéis ver cómo sufren nuestros voluntarios del banco de reciclaje informático de ESF Galicia, testeando plataformas de videojuegos libres para un proyecto de la Asociación Melisa ...
    ;)
    CC: @jugandoenlinux @leillo1975
    #TrabajosForzados #0AD #OpenArena

  2. CW: UK Politics; Dido Harding

    📣 Seeing a lot of “breaking news” about a and Runnymede Trust case from earlier this year (a time when I was Legal Director of GLP), in which then-Health Secretary was found to have acted unlawfully when he appointed as the head of without due regard to equalities law

    It’s not new, but it seems to do the rounds every so often. People are still really cross it seems!

    You can read more👇 goodlawproject.org/update/dido

  3. Nurses, Teachers, transport workers were all key workers during the pandemic. Now #rishisunak and the #tories want us to believe that they are a menace to our society. Are they really a menace?
    #TestAndTrace cost us 37 billions
    #ppe cost us 8.7 billions (went to #tory donors?)
    #Brexit cost us 40 billions on tax revenue
    #rishisunak cost us 11 billions on overpaid interest on #UK #debt
    “There is no magic money tree” #stevebarclays”.
    #strike #nurses #rmt #postoffice #teachers

  4. Nurses, Teachers, transport workers were all key workers during the pandemic. Now #rishisunak and the #tories want us to believe that they are a menace to our society. Are they really a menace?
    #TestAndTrace cost us 37 billions
    #ppe cost us 8.7 billions (went to #tory donors?)
    #Brexit cost us 40 billions on tax revenue
    #rishisunak cost us 11 billions on overpaid interest on #UK #debt
    “There is no magic money tree” #stevebarclays”.
    #strike #nurses #rmt #postoffice #teachers

  5. Nurses, Teachers, transport workers were all key workers during the pandemic. Now #rishisunak and the #tories want us to believe that they are a menace to our society. Are they really a menace?
    #TestAndTrace cost us 37 billions
    #ppe cost us 8.7 billions (went to #tory donors?)
    #Brexit cost us 40 billions on tax revenue
    #rishisunak cost us 11 billions on overpaid interest on #UK #debt
    “There is no magic money tree” #stevebarclays”.
    #strike #nurses #rmt #postoffice #teachers

  6. Aquí podéis ver cómo sufren nuestros voluntarios del banco de reciclaje informático de ESF Galicia, testeando plataformas de videojuegos libres para un proyecto de la Asociación Melisa ...
    ;)
    CC: @jugandoenlinux @leillo1975
    #TrabajosForzados #0AD #OpenArena

  7. Aquí podéis ver cómo sufren nuestros voluntarios del banco de reciclaje informático de ESF Galicia, testeando plataformas de videojuegos libres para un proyecto de la Asociación Melisa ...
    ;)
    CC: @jugandoenlinux @leillo1975
    #TrabajosForzados #0AD #OpenArena

  8. Aquí podéis ver cómo sufren nuestros voluntarios del banco de reciclaje informático de ESF Galicia, testeando plataformas de videojuegos libres para un proyecto de la Asociación Melisa ...
    ;)
    CC: @jugandoenlinux @leillo1975
    #TrabajosForzados #0AD #OpenArena

  9. Aquí podéis ver cómo sufren nuestros voluntarios del banco de reciclaje informático de ESF Galicia, testeando plataformas de videojuegos libres para un proyecto de la Asociación Melisa ...
    ;)
    CC: @jugandoenlinux @leillo1975
    #TrabajosForzados #0AD #OpenArena

  10. Heute abend durfte meine online Runde wieder ein wenig Zeit in Gotham verbringen. Doof wenn man einen testanzug von Batman hat und alle wollen den haben.
    Regelwerk : #CityOfMist

    #pnpde #batmsn #Comic #superhelden #scarcrow
    Nächsten Dienstag geht es weiter

  11. Heute abend durfte meine online Runde wieder ein wenig Zeit in Gotham verbringen. Doof wenn man einen testanzug von Batman hat und alle wollen den haben.
    Regelwerk : #CityOfMist

    #pnpde #batmsn #Comic #superhelden #scarcrow
    Nächsten Dienstag geht es weiter

  12. Heute abend durfte meine online Runde wieder ein wenig Zeit in Gotham verbringen. Doof wenn man einen testanzug von Batman hat und alle wollen den haben.
    Regelwerk : #CityOfMist

    #pnpde #batmsn #Comic #superhelden #scarcrow
    Nächsten Dienstag geht es weiter

  13. Heute abend durfte meine online Runde wieder ein wenig Zeit in Gotham verbringen. Doof wenn man einen testanzug von Batman hat und alle wollen den haben.
    Regelwerk : #CityOfMist

    #pnpde #batmsn #Comic #superhelden #scarcrow
    Nächsten Dienstag geht es weiter

  14. Heute abend durfte meine online Runde wieder ein wenig Zeit in Gotham verbringen. Doof wenn man einen testanzug von Batman hat und alle wollen den haben.
    Regelwerk : #CityOfMist

    #pnpde #batmsn #Comic #superhelden #scarcrow
    Nächsten Dienstag geht es weiter

  15. DATE: May 10, 2026 at 02:00PM
    SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

    ** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
    -------------------------------------------------

    TITLE: A half hour of aerobic exercise reduces test anxiety and boosts cognitive focus in students

    URL: psypost.org/a-half-hour-of-aer

    A brief session of moderate aerobic exercise can ease the psychological burden of test anxiety while sharpening the specific mental skills needed to ignore distractions. Researchers found that a quick run on a treadmill rebalances brain activity, helping students process conflicting information with greater speed and focus. The findings were recently published in Physiology & Behavior.

    Test-related distress is a common experience that goes beyond simple nervousness. It involves intense worry, physical tension, a racing heartbeat, and scattered thoughts that arise before or during an evaluative situation. People facing this condition often struggle with a cognitive skill known as inhibitory control.

    Inhibitory control is the brain’s ability to tune out irrelevant information and suppress impulsive responses. It acts as a mental filter that allows a person to focus on a test question rather than the ticking of a clock or their own internal worries. This mental barricade prevents distracting signals from derailing a person’s train of thought.

    When psychological distress disrupts this mental filter, students become easily distracted by their own fears. Their brains dedicate precious processing power to managing the worry itself, leaving less energy available for actual problem-solving. This scattered focus degrades their academic performance and fuels even more worry.

    The experience can create a loop of poor performance and escalating anxiety. To break this cycle, psychologists Lingfeng Wu and Renlai Zhou from Nanjing University designed an experiment to see if physical activity could serve as an immediate remedy. They wanted to evaluate whether an acute session of aerobic exercise could temporarily repair the mental filters of affected students.

    The research team recruited forty university students who scored very high on an established anxiety questionnaire. These participants were randomly divided into two groups of twenty. One group was assigned to an aerobic exercise intervention, while the other served as a resting control group.

    During the main phase of the experiment, the exercise group spent thirty minutes walking and jogging on a treadmill. The researchers continuously monitored the participants’ heart rates to ensure the activity remained at a moderate intensity. The control group spent the same thirty minutes sitting in a quiet room reading neutral, sports-related magazines.

    Both before and after these thirty-minute sessions, the students underwent a specialized cognitive assessment known as the Flanker task. This computer-based challenge is specifically designed to measure a person’s inhibitory control abilities.

    In the Flanker task, participants stare at a computer screen and wait for a row of five arrows to appear. They must quickly identify the direction the middle arrow is pointing, choosing either left or right. The challenge comes from the surrounding arrows, which act as deliberate visual distractions.

    In some trials, all the arrows point in the exact same direction, making the response relatively easy. In other trials, the outer arrows point in the opposite direction of the center target. This creates a visual conflict that the participant must mentally override in order to choose the correct answer.

    Throughout this task, the researchers recorded the students’ brain activity using an electroencephalogram. This device consists of a fitted cap with small sensors placed across the scalp to detect electrical signals in the brain. The scientists paid close attention to two specific brain wave patterns, known as the N2 and P3 waves.

    To replicate the pressure of a real testing environment, the researchers manipulated the stakes of the computer task using a standard psychological tactic. They told the students that they were taking a highly reliable aptitude test that would successfully predict their future university performance. They also offered a cash reward for the top performers and informed the students that they were being recorded on video for expert analysis.

    The results showed that the thirty-minute exercise session had an immediate, measurable impact. Students in the treadmill group reported lower levels of subjective anxiety on their questionnaires after working out. The control group saw no statistical difference in their self-reported anxiety levels.

    The behavioral data from the computer task mirrored these emotional improvements. After exercising, the treadmill group became much faster at identifying the correct arrow direction across all trials.

    More importantly, the exercise group showed a marked improvement in the difficult, conflicting trials. The reaction time gap between the easy trials and the hard trials shrank considerably. This reduction suggests a direct upgrade in their ability to filter out distracting, conflicting information.

    Accuracy remained very high for almost all participants across both groups. The researchers note that anxiety usually damages processing speed rather than raw accuracy. The fact that the exercise group got faster without making more mistakes confirms that their overall processing efficiency genuinely improved.

    The brain wave recordings provided an internal view of how the exercise changed the participants’ cognitive processing. The researchers looked first at the N2 wave, an electrical pulse that peaks just after a person encounters conflicting information.

    In the exercise group, the electrical amplitude of the N2 wave became noticeably smaller after the treadmill session. A smaller N2 wave typically means the brain is exerting less effort to detect and manage conflicting stimuli. The physical activity seemed to make the brain’s early conflict-monitoring system run more smoothly.

    The team also measured the P3 wave, which appears slightly later than the N2 wave. The P3 wave is tied to how effectively the brain allocates its attention to a given task.

    After the treadmill session, the exercise group generated a much larger P3 wave. This expansion indicates a heightened capacity to direct mental resources exactly where they need to go.

    The control group essentially spun their wheels. The brain wave readings for the seated control group were not statistically significant when comparing their before and after states. Their brains processed the conflicting arrows with the exact same level of effort and attention as they had during the baseline test.

    The researchers attribute these mental shifts to the neurochemical changes sparked by physical exertion. Moderate aerobic activity prompts the brain to release chemicals like dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These neurotransmitters help regulate mood and boost the function of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region heavily involved in higher-level reasoning and maintaining focus.

    Lowering the students’ subjective anxiety likely freed up mental energy as well. When people aren’t dedicating active brainpower to worrying, they have more cognitive resources available to tackle the task in front of them without feeling overwhelmed.

    While the results are promising, the research team noted several boundaries to their experiment. The study only monitored university students, entirely omitting middle and high school students who often experience the highest rates of academic distress. Future studies will need to test younger age groups.

    The experiment also relied on an artificial testing scenario. While the researchers used cash prizes and video recordings to simulate stress, this setup does not perfectly mirror the emotional stakes of a real university exam. Tracking students during an actual testing week would provide more realistic data.

    In addition, the study did not include a control group composed of students with low anxiety levels. Without this baseline, it is difficult to determine if the exercise brought the anxious students’ mental skills back to an average level or just elevated them slightly from a severe deficit.

    Finally, a thirty-minute run is a temporary intervention. Even after the treadmill session, the students’ distress scores still registered moderately high. Researchers hope to investigate whether a consistent exercise routine, perhaps combined with psychological therapies, might offer a more lasting solution to academic anxiety.

    The study, “Acute aerobic exercise improves inhibitory control in individuals with test anxiety: evidence from event-related potentials,” was authored by Lingfeng Wu and Renlai Zhou.

    URL: psypost.org/a-half-hour-of-aer

    -------------------------------------------------

    DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.

    Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: clinicians-exchange.org

    Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

    NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot

    Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: nationalpsychologist.com

    EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: subscribe-article-digests.clin

    READ ONLINE: read-the-rss-mega-archive.clin

    It's primitive... but it works... mostly...

    -------------------------------------------------

    #psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #TestAnxiety #AerobicExercise #CognitiveFocus #InhibitoryControl #FlankerTask #BrainWaves #N2P3 #PrefrontalCortex #AcademicPerformance #MentalFocus

  16. DATE: May 10, 2026 at 02:00PM
    SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

    ** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
    -------------------------------------------------

    TITLE: A half hour of aerobic exercise reduces test anxiety and boosts cognitive focus in students

    URL: psypost.org/a-half-hour-of-aer

    A brief session of moderate aerobic exercise can ease the psychological burden of test anxiety while sharpening the specific mental skills needed to ignore distractions. Researchers found that a quick run on a treadmill rebalances brain activity, helping students process conflicting information with greater speed and focus. The findings were recently published in Physiology & Behavior.

    Test-related distress is a common experience that goes beyond simple nervousness. It involves intense worry, physical tension, a racing heartbeat, and scattered thoughts that arise before or during an evaluative situation. People facing this condition often struggle with a cognitive skill known as inhibitory control.

    Inhibitory control is the brain’s ability to tune out irrelevant information and suppress impulsive responses. It acts as a mental filter that allows a person to focus on a test question rather than the ticking of a clock or their own internal worries. This mental barricade prevents distracting signals from derailing a person’s train of thought.

    When psychological distress disrupts this mental filter, students become easily distracted by their own fears. Their brains dedicate precious processing power to managing the worry itself, leaving less energy available for actual problem-solving. This scattered focus degrades their academic performance and fuels even more worry.

    The experience can create a loop of poor performance and escalating anxiety. To break this cycle, psychologists Lingfeng Wu and Renlai Zhou from Nanjing University designed an experiment to see if physical activity could serve as an immediate remedy. They wanted to evaluate whether an acute session of aerobic exercise could temporarily repair the mental filters of affected students.

    The research team recruited forty university students who scored very high on an established anxiety questionnaire. These participants were randomly divided into two groups of twenty. One group was assigned to an aerobic exercise intervention, while the other served as a resting control group.

    During the main phase of the experiment, the exercise group spent thirty minutes walking and jogging on a treadmill. The researchers continuously monitored the participants’ heart rates to ensure the activity remained at a moderate intensity. The control group spent the same thirty minutes sitting in a quiet room reading neutral, sports-related magazines.

    Both before and after these thirty-minute sessions, the students underwent a specialized cognitive assessment known as the Flanker task. This computer-based challenge is specifically designed to measure a person’s inhibitory control abilities.

    In the Flanker task, participants stare at a computer screen and wait for a row of five arrows to appear. They must quickly identify the direction the middle arrow is pointing, choosing either left or right. The challenge comes from the surrounding arrows, which act as deliberate visual distractions.

    In some trials, all the arrows point in the exact same direction, making the response relatively easy. In other trials, the outer arrows point in the opposite direction of the center target. This creates a visual conflict that the participant must mentally override in order to choose the correct answer.

    Throughout this task, the researchers recorded the students’ brain activity using an electroencephalogram. This device consists of a fitted cap with small sensors placed across the scalp to detect electrical signals in the brain. The scientists paid close attention to two specific brain wave patterns, known as the N2 and P3 waves.

    To replicate the pressure of a real testing environment, the researchers manipulated the stakes of the computer task using a standard psychological tactic. They told the students that they were taking a highly reliable aptitude test that would successfully predict their future university performance. They also offered a cash reward for the top performers and informed the students that they were being recorded on video for expert analysis.

    The results showed that the thirty-minute exercise session had an immediate, measurable impact. Students in the treadmill group reported lower levels of subjective anxiety on their questionnaires after working out. The control group saw no statistical difference in their self-reported anxiety levels.

    The behavioral data from the computer task mirrored these emotional improvements. After exercising, the treadmill group became much faster at identifying the correct arrow direction across all trials.

    More importantly, the exercise group showed a marked improvement in the difficult, conflicting trials. The reaction time gap between the easy trials and the hard trials shrank considerably. This reduction suggests a direct upgrade in their ability to filter out distracting, conflicting information.

    Accuracy remained very high for almost all participants across both groups. The researchers note that anxiety usually damages processing speed rather than raw accuracy. The fact that the exercise group got faster without making more mistakes confirms that their overall processing efficiency genuinely improved.

    The brain wave recordings provided an internal view of how the exercise changed the participants’ cognitive processing. The researchers looked first at the N2 wave, an electrical pulse that peaks just after a person encounters conflicting information.

    In the exercise group, the electrical amplitude of the N2 wave became noticeably smaller after the treadmill session. A smaller N2 wave typically means the brain is exerting less effort to detect and manage conflicting stimuli. The physical activity seemed to make the brain’s early conflict-monitoring system run more smoothly.

    The team also measured the P3 wave, which appears slightly later than the N2 wave. The P3 wave is tied to how effectively the brain allocates its attention to a given task.

    After the treadmill session, the exercise group generated a much larger P3 wave. This expansion indicates a heightened capacity to direct mental resources exactly where they need to go.

    The control group essentially spun their wheels. The brain wave readings for the seated control group were not statistically significant when comparing their before and after states. Their brains processed the conflicting arrows with the exact same level of effort and attention as they had during the baseline test.

    The researchers attribute these mental shifts to the neurochemical changes sparked by physical exertion. Moderate aerobic activity prompts the brain to release chemicals like dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These neurotransmitters help regulate mood and boost the function of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region heavily involved in higher-level reasoning and maintaining focus.

    Lowering the students’ subjective anxiety likely freed up mental energy as well. When people aren’t dedicating active brainpower to worrying, they have more cognitive resources available to tackle the task in front of them without feeling overwhelmed.

    While the results are promising, the research team noted several boundaries to their experiment. The study only monitored university students, entirely omitting middle and high school students who often experience the highest rates of academic distress. Future studies will need to test younger age groups.

    The experiment also relied on an artificial testing scenario. While the researchers used cash prizes and video recordings to simulate stress, this setup does not perfectly mirror the emotional stakes of a real university exam. Tracking students during an actual testing week would provide more realistic data.

    In addition, the study did not include a control group composed of students with low anxiety levels. Without this baseline, it is difficult to determine if the exercise brought the anxious students’ mental skills back to an average level or just elevated them slightly from a severe deficit.

    Finally, a thirty-minute run is a temporary intervention. Even after the treadmill session, the students’ distress scores still registered moderately high. Researchers hope to investigate whether a consistent exercise routine, perhaps combined with psychological therapies, might offer a more lasting solution to academic anxiety.

    The study, “Acute aerobic exercise improves inhibitory control in individuals with test anxiety: evidence from event-related potentials,” was authored by Lingfeng Wu and Renlai Zhou.

    URL: psypost.org/a-half-hour-of-aer

    -------------------------------------------------

    DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.

    Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: clinicians-exchange.org

    Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

    NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot

    Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: nationalpsychologist.com

    EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: subscribe-article-digests.clin

    READ ONLINE: read-the-rss-mega-archive.clin

    It's primitive... but it works... mostly...

    -------------------------------------------------

    #psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #TestAnxiety #AerobicExercise #CognitiveFocus #InhibitoryControl #FlankerTask #BrainWaves #N2P3 #PrefrontalCortex #AcademicPerformance #MentalFocus

  17. DATE: May 10, 2026 at 02:00PM
    SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

    ** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
    -------------------------------------------------

    TITLE: A half hour of aerobic exercise reduces test anxiety and boosts cognitive focus in students

    URL: psypost.org/a-half-hour-of-aer

    A brief session of moderate aerobic exercise can ease the psychological burden of test anxiety while sharpening the specific mental skills needed to ignore distractions. Researchers found that a quick run on a treadmill rebalances brain activity, helping students process conflicting information with greater speed and focus. The findings were recently published in Physiology & Behavior.

    Test-related distress is a common experience that goes beyond simple nervousness. It involves intense worry, physical tension, a racing heartbeat, and scattered thoughts that arise before or during an evaluative situation. People facing this condition often struggle with a cognitive skill known as inhibitory control.

    Inhibitory control is the brain’s ability to tune out irrelevant information and suppress impulsive responses. It acts as a mental filter that allows a person to focus on a test question rather than the ticking of a clock or their own internal worries. This mental barricade prevents distracting signals from derailing a person’s train of thought.

    When psychological distress disrupts this mental filter, students become easily distracted by their own fears. Their brains dedicate precious processing power to managing the worry itself, leaving less energy available for actual problem-solving. This scattered focus degrades their academic performance and fuels even more worry.

    The experience can create a loop of poor performance and escalating anxiety. To break this cycle, psychologists Lingfeng Wu and Renlai Zhou from Nanjing University designed an experiment to see if physical activity could serve as an immediate remedy. They wanted to evaluate whether an acute session of aerobic exercise could temporarily repair the mental filters of affected students.

    The research team recruited forty university students who scored very high on an established anxiety questionnaire. These participants were randomly divided into two groups of twenty. One group was assigned to an aerobic exercise intervention, while the other served as a resting control group.

    During the main phase of the experiment, the exercise group spent thirty minutes walking and jogging on a treadmill. The researchers continuously monitored the participants’ heart rates to ensure the activity remained at a moderate intensity. The control group spent the same thirty minutes sitting in a quiet room reading neutral, sports-related magazines.

    Both before and after these thirty-minute sessions, the students underwent a specialized cognitive assessment known as the Flanker task. This computer-based challenge is specifically designed to measure a person’s inhibitory control abilities.

    In the Flanker task, participants stare at a computer screen and wait for a row of five arrows to appear. They must quickly identify the direction the middle arrow is pointing, choosing either left or right. The challenge comes from the surrounding arrows, which act as deliberate visual distractions.

    In some trials, all the arrows point in the exact same direction, making the response relatively easy. In other trials, the outer arrows point in the opposite direction of the center target. This creates a visual conflict that the participant must mentally override in order to choose the correct answer.

    Throughout this task, the researchers recorded the students’ brain activity using an electroencephalogram. This device consists of a fitted cap with small sensors placed across the scalp to detect electrical signals in the brain. The scientists paid close attention to two specific brain wave patterns, known as the N2 and P3 waves.

    To replicate the pressure of a real testing environment, the researchers manipulated the stakes of the computer task using a standard psychological tactic. They told the students that they were taking a highly reliable aptitude test that would successfully predict their future university performance. They also offered a cash reward for the top performers and informed the students that they were being recorded on video for expert analysis.

    The results showed that the thirty-minute exercise session had an immediate, measurable impact. Students in the treadmill group reported lower levels of subjective anxiety on their questionnaires after working out. The control group saw no statistical difference in their self-reported anxiety levels.

    The behavioral data from the computer task mirrored these emotional improvements. After exercising, the treadmill group became much faster at identifying the correct arrow direction across all trials.

    More importantly, the exercise group showed a marked improvement in the difficult, conflicting trials. The reaction time gap between the easy trials and the hard trials shrank considerably. This reduction suggests a direct upgrade in their ability to filter out distracting, conflicting information.

    Accuracy remained very high for almost all participants across both groups. The researchers note that anxiety usually damages processing speed rather than raw accuracy. The fact that the exercise group got faster without making more mistakes confirms that their overall processing efficiency genuinely improved.

    The brain wave recordings provided an internal view of how the exercise changed the participants’ cognitive processing. The researchers looked first at the N2 wave, an electrical pulse that peaks just after a person encounters conflicting information.

    In the exercise group, the electrical amplitude of the N2 wave became noticeably smaller after the treadmill session. A smaller N2 wave typically means the brain is exerting less effort to detect and manage conflicting stimuli. The physical activity seemed to make the brain’s early conflict-monitoring system run more smoothly.

    The team also measured the P3 wave, which appears slightly later than the N2 wave. The P3 wave is tied to how effectively the brain allocates its attention to a given task.

    After the treadmill session, the exercise group generated a much larger P3 wave. This expansion indicates a heightened capacity to direct mental resources exactly where they need to go.

    The control group essentially spun their wheels. The brain wave readings for the seated control group were not statistically significant when comparing their before and after states. Their brains processed the conflicting arrows with the exact same level of effort and attention as they had during the baseline test.

    The researchers attribute these mental shifts to the neurochemical changes sparked by physical exertion. Moderate aerobic activity prompts the brain to release chemicals like dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These neurotransmitters help regulate mood and boost the function of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region heavily involved in higher-level reasoning and maintaining focus.

    Lowering the students’ subjective anxiety likely freed up mental energy as well. When people aren’t dedicating active brainpower to worrying, they have more cognitive resources available to tackle the task in front of them without feeling overwhelmed.

    While the results are promising, the research team noted several boundaries to their experiment. The study only monitored university students, entirely omitting middle and high school students who often experience the highest rates of academic distress. Future studies will need to test younger age groups.

    The experiment also relied on an artificial testing scenario. While the researchers used cash prizes and video recordings to simulate stress, this setup does not perfectly mirror the emotional stakes of a real university exam. Tracking students during an actual testing week would provide more realistic data.

    In addition, the study did not include a control group composed of students with low anxiety levels. Without this baseline, it is difficult to determine if the exercise brought the anxious students’ mental skills back to an average level or just elevated them slightly from a severe deficit.

    Finally, a thirty-minute run is a temporary intervention. Even after the treadmill session, the students’ distress scores still registered moderately high. Researchers hope to investigate whether a consistent exercise routine, perhaps combined with psychological therapies, might offer a more lasting solution to academic anxiety.

    The study, “Acute aerobic exercise improves inhibitory control in individuals with test anxiety: evidence from event-related potentials,” was authored by Lingfeng Wu and Renlai Zhou.

    URL: psypost.org/a-half-hour-of-aer

    -------------------------------------------------

    DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.

    Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: clinicians-exchange.org

    Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot

    NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot

    Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: nationalpsychologist.com

    EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: subscribe-article-digests.clin

    READ ONLINE: read-the-rss-mega-archive.clin

    It's primitive... but it works... mostly...

    -------------------------------------------------

    #psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #TestAnxiety #AerobicExercise #CognitiveFocus #InhibitoryControl #FlankerTask #BrainWaves #N2P3 #PrefrontalCortex #AcademicPerformance #MentalFocus

  18. 🚀🕰️ Ah, the #nostalgia of square brackets in shell scripting—the forgotten relics of our #coding youth! 🤓📚 Luca Ferrari takes us on a time-traveling adventure to rediscover the ancient art of 'test,' proving once again that some people will do anything to relive their university glory days. 🎓💾
    fluca1978.github.io/2025/12/10 #test #shellscript #retro #tech #HackerNews #ngated

  19. Sometimes, when I write a little tool, I am responsible enough to write some tests. When it's a Python tool, I can use Python's excellent built-in test harness (`python -m unittest`), but when I'm using some other language — or worse, a combination of languages — it would be nice to have a similar tool available.

    I've discovered Perl's `prove` command - it looks for executable scripts matching `t/*.t`, it runs them (possibly in parallel), interprets their output according to a very straight-forward plain-text protocol ( testanything.org/ ), and shows a summary of the results. Very nice!

    Unfortunately, when a test fails, it doesn't actually tell you *which* test failed. You can run `prove -f` which runs the tests again and prints the name of failing tests, but *only* the name. If they printed out some helpful diagnostics or logging, it's lost. You can also add verbose mode with `prove -f -v` to print all the diagnostics tests produce - but it shows *all* the diagnostics, even the ones from passing tests, not just the failed tests.

    This seems... suboptimal.

    #perl #tap

  20. Vortrag Jörg Rossbach: „FLASH - a 'historical' perspective“

    Ein Blick zurück: Diese Folie stammt aus einem Vortrag von Björn H. Wiik beim #TESLA Collaboration Board Meeting am 13. September 1995.
    Sie zeigt den Entwurf des Freie-Elektronen-Lasers, der wenige Jahre später als
    FLASH in Hamburg Realität wurde.
    Geplant war, den Elektronenstrahl aus der TESLA-Testanlage in einen 10–25 m langen Undulator zu schicken – das Grundprinzip eines #SASE #FEL, bei dem Elektronen selbstverstärkend kohärentes Licht erzeugen.
    Nur fünf Jahre später gelang das „First Lasing“ – ein Meilenstein der Photonenwissenschaft.

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