Can Positive Emotion Reduce the Impact of Stress in Teens?
High school students today face increasing pressure to perform, succeed and excel. UCSF Osher Center researcher, Judy Moskowitz, PhD, is teaching high school students how to cope with stress in an unexpected and innovative way–by increasing their positive emotions. The program, called Coping and Emotional Development for Adolescents to Reduce Stress (CEDARS), is being piloted with students at a local high school in San Francisco. In a recent interview, Dr. Moskowitz provided insight into this unique, school-based intervention that is helping teens better cope with increasing levels of stress. Dr. Moskowitz, would you describe the project? The basic idea of CEDARS is to test a positive emotion skills intervention that we’ve developed in adults coping with serious illness to see if it helps high school students, and eventually middle school students, cope better with stress. We think that these positive affect, or positive emotion, skills aren’t specific to people with illness or major l
