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Students at Shaker Heights High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, on Jan. 25, the day before they took the SAT or SAT
math subject test. Clockwise from top left: Elana Ross, Linda Fan, Aryanna Jones, Sasha Rae-Grant, Patrick Reed,
Jeremy McMillan. More Photos »
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By PO BRONSON and ASHLEY MERRYMAN
Published: February 6, 2013 232 Comments
1. Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure
Noah Muthler took his first state standardized test in third grade at FACEBOOK While Others Fall Apart?

the Spring Cove Elementary School in Roaring Spring, Pa. It was a TWITTER

miserable experience, said his mother, Kathleen Muthler. He was a 2. TOOL KIT
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test.’ ” In fourth grade, he was upset the whole week before the SHARE
exam. “He manifests it physically,” his mother said. “He got 4. THE STONE
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headaches and stomachaches. He would ask not to go to school.” Depression and the Limits of Psychiatry
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Not a good sleeper anyway, Noah would slip downstairs after an
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hour tossing in bed and ask his mom to lie down with him until he The Persistence of Racial Resentment

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Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? - NYTimes.com

fell asleep. In fifth grade, the anxiety lasted a solid month before
the test. “Even after the test, he couldn’t let it go. He would wonder 6. WELL

about questions he feared he misunderstood,” Muthler said. Gluten-Free, Whether You Need It or Not

So this year, Muthler is opting Noah out of the 7. Northeast Braces for a Major Snowstorm
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taking the tests in March has put Noah in a better frame 8. WELL
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immediately, he can talk it through without any panic.
“He looks forward to science class and math class again,”
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Muthler understands Noah’s distress; more mysterious is Go to Complete List » Show My Recommendations
why her son Jacob, who is in eighth grade, isn’t the least
Readers’ Comments bit unnerved by the same tests. He, too, is in the gifted
program, but that seems to give him breezy confidence,
Share your thoughts.
not fear. “You would think he doesn’t even care,” Muthler
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Read All Comments (232) » marveled. “Noah has the panic and anxiety for both of
them.” Nevertheless, she will opt out Jacob from the tests,
too, to be consistent.

Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant
so much for a child’s academic future. As more school districts strive for accountability,
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standardized exam is the truer measure. Sure, you did your homework and wrote a great 'Real' Life in North Korea
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that all this test-taking is churning out sleep-deprived, overworked, miserable children.

But some children actually do better under competitive, stressful circumstances. Why
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can Jacob thrive under pressure, while it undoes Noah? And how should that difference
inform the way we think about high-stakes testing? An emerging field of research — and
a pioneering study from Taiwan — has begun to offer some clues. Like any kind of
human behavior, our response to competitive pressure is derived from a complex set of
factors — how we were raised, our skills and experience, the hormones that we
marinated in as fetuses. There is also a genetic component: One particular gene, referred
to as the COMT gene, could to a large degree explain why one child is more prone to be
a worrier, while another may be unflappable, or in the memorable phrasing of David
Goldman, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, more of a warrior.

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Every May in Taiwan, more than 200,000 ninth-grade children take the Basic
Competency Test for Junior High School Students. This is not just any test. The scores
will determine which high school the students are admitted to — or if they get into one

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Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? - NYTimes.com

at all. Only 39 percent of Taiwanese children make the cut, with the rest diverted to
vocational schools or backup private schools. The test, in essence, determines the future
for Taiwanese children.

The test is incredibly difficult; answering the multiple-choice questions requires

knowledge of chemistry, physics, advanced algebra and geometry, and testing lasts for
two days. “Many students go to cram school almost every night to study all the subjects
on the test,” says Chun-Yen Chang, director of the Science Education Center at National
Taiwan Normal University. “Just one or two percentage points difference will drag you
from the No. 1 high school in the local region down to No. 3 or 4.”

In other words, the exam was a perfect, real world experiment for studying the effects of
genetics on high-stakes competition. Chang and his research team took blood samples
from 779 students who had recently taken the Basic Competency Test in three regions of
Taiwan. They matched each student’s genotype to his or her test score.

The researchers were interested in a single gene, the COMT gene. This gene carries the
assembly code for an enzyme that clears dopamine from the prefrontal cortex. That part
of the brain is where we plan, make decisions, anticipate future consequences and
resolve conflicts. “Dopamine changes the firing rate of neurons, speeding up the brain
like a turbocharger,” says Silvia Bunge, associate professor of psychology and
neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. Our brains work best when
dopamine is maintained at an optimal level. You don’t want too much, or too little. By
removing dopamine, the COMT enzyme helps regulate neural activity and maintain
mental function.

Here’s the thing: There are two variants of the gene. One variant builds enzymes that
slowly remove dopamine. The other variant builds enzymes that rapidly clear dopamine.
We all carry the genes for one or the other, or a combination of the two.

In lab experiments, people have been given a variety of cognitive tasks — computerized
puzzles and games, portions of I.Q. tests — and researchers have consistently found that,
under normal conditions, those with slow-acting enzymes have a cognitive advantage.
They have superior executive function and all it entails: they can reason, solve problems,
orchestrate complex thought and better foresee consequences. They can concentrate
better. This advantage appears to increase with the number of years of education.

The brains of the people with the other variant, meanwhile, are comparatively
lackadaisical. The fast-acting enzymes remove too much dopamine, so the overall level is
too low. The prefrontal cortex simply doesn’t work as well.

On that score alone, having slow-acting enzymes sounds better. There seems to be a
trade-off, however, to these slow enzymes, one triggered by stress. In the absence of
stress, there is a cognitive advantage. But when under stress, the advantage goes away
and in fact reverses itself.

“Stress floods the prefrontal cortex with dopamine,” says Adele Diamond, professor of
developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. A little
booster hit of dopamine is normally a good thing, but the big surge brought on by stress
is too much for people with the slow-acting enzyme, which can’t remove the dopamine
fast enough. “Much like flooding a car engine with too much gasoline, prefrontal-cortex
function melts down,” Diamond says.

Other research has found that those with the slow-acting enzymes have higher I.Q.’ s, on
average. One study of Beijing schoolchildren calculated the advantage to be 10 I.Q.
points. But it was unclear if the cognitive advantages they had would stay with them
when they were under stress outside the security of the lab environment.

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Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? - NYTimes.com

The Taiwan study was the first to look at the COMT gene in a high-stakes, real-life
setting. Would the I.Q. advantage hold up, or would the stress undermine performance?

It was the latter. The Taiwanese students with the slow-acting enzymes sank on the
national exam. On average, they scored 8 percent lower than those with the fast-acting
enzymes. It was as if some of the A students and B students traded places at test time.

“I am not against pressure. Actually, pressure is good [for] someone,” Chang commented.
“But those who are more vulnerable to stress will be more disadvantaged.”

As of 2014, Taiwan will no longer require all students to take the Basic Competency
Test, as the country moves to 12-year compulsory education. The system will no longer
be built to weed out children, but to keep them all in school. But academically advanced
students will still take some kind of entrance exam. And those elite students will still feel
the pressure, which, it bears repeating, will hurt some but help others.

“The people who perform best in normal conditions may not be the same people who
perform best under stress,” Diamond says. People born with the fast-acting enzymes
“actually need the stress to perform their best.” To them, the everyday is
underwhelming; it doesn’t excite them enough to stimulate the sharpness of mind of
which they are capable. They benefit from that surge in dopamine — it raises the level up
to optimal. They are like Superman emerging from the phone booth in times of crisis;
their abilities to concentrate and solve problems go up.

Some scholars have suggested that we are all Warriors or Worriers. Those with fast-
acting dopamine clearers are the Warriors, ready for threatening environments where
maximum performance is required. Those with slow-acting dopamine clearers are the
Worriers, capable of more complex planning. Over the course of evolution, both
Warriors and Worriers were necessary for human tribes to survive.

In truth, because we all get one COMT gene from our father and one from our mother,
about half of all people inherit one of each gene variation, so they have a mix of the
enzymes and are somewhere in between the Warriors and the Worriers. About a quarter
of people carry Warrior-only genes, and a quarter of people Worrier-only.

A number of research studies are looking at COMT, including several involving the
American military. Researchers at Brown University have been studying COMT’s
connection to post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Quinn Kennedy, a research psychologist at the Naval Postgraduate School,
is studying how the gene correlates with pilot performance. Douglas C. Johnson, a
professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, is part of a consortium
of researchers called the OptiBrain Center, where he is interested in COMT’s role in
combat performance and well-being.

While the studies are ongoing, the early results show those with Worrier-genes can still
handle incredible stress — as long as they are well trained. Even some Navy SEALs have
the Worrier genes, so you can literally be a Worrier-gene Warrior. In Kennedy’s sample,
almost a third of the expert pilots were Worriers — a larger proportion than in the
general population.

Kennedy’s work is particularly revealing. She puts pilots through a series of six flight-
simulator tests, where pilots endure turbulence, oil-pressure problems, iced carburetors
and crosswinds while landing. They are kept furiously busy, dialing to new frequencies,
flying to new altitudes and headings and punching in transponder codes.

Among recreational pilots with the lowest rating level — trained to fly only in daylight —
those with Warrior genes performed best. But that changed with more experience.

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Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? - NYTimes.com

Among recreational pilots who had the next level of qualification — trained to fly at night
using cockpit instruments — the Worriers far outperformed the Warriors. Their
genetically blessed working memory and attention advantage kicked in. And their
experience meant they didn’t melt under the pressure of their genetic curse.

What this suggests, Kennedy says, is that, for Worriers, “through training, they can learn
to manage the particular stress in the specific pilot training, even if it is not necessarily
transferred over to other parts of their lives.”

So while the single-shot stakes of a standardized exam is particularly ill suited for
Worrier genotypes, this doesn’t mean that they should be shielded from all challenge. In
fact, shielding them could be the worst response, depriving them of the chance to
acclimate to recurring stressors. Johnson explains this as a form of stress inoculation:
You tax them without overwhelming them. “And then allow for sufficient recovery,” he
continued. Training, preparation and repetition defuse the Worrier’s curse.

There are many psychological and physiological reasons that long-term stress is
harmful, but the science of elite performance has drawn a different conclusion about
short-term stress. Studies that compare professionals with amateur competitors —
whether concert pianists, male rugby or female volleyball players — show that
professionals feel just as much anxiety as amateurs. The difference is in how they
interpret their anxiety. The amateurs view it as detrimental, while the professionals tend
to view stress as energizing. It gets them to focus.

A similar mental shift can also help students in test-taking situations. Jeremy Jamieson,
assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Rochester, has done a series
of experiments that reveal how the labeling of stress affects performance on academic
testing.

The first experiment was at Harvard University with undergraduates who were studying
for the Graduate Record Examination. Before taking a practice test, the students read a
short note explaining that the study’s purpose was to examine the effects of stress on
cognition. Half of the students, however, were also given a statement declaring that
recent research suggests “people who feel anxious during a test might actually do better.”
Therefore, if the students felt anxious during the practice test, it said, “you shouldn’t feel
concerned. . . simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.”

Just reading this statement significantly improved students’ performance. They scored
50 points higher in the quantitative section (out of a possible 800) than the control
group on the practice test. Remarkable as that seemed, it is relatively easy to get a result
in a lab. Would it affect their actual G.R.E. results? A couple of months later, the
students turned in their real G.R.E. scores. Jamieson calculated that the group taught to
see anxiety as beneficial in the lab experiment scored 65 points higher than the controls.
In ongoing work, Jamieson is replicating the experiment with remedial math students at
a Midwestern community college: after they were told to think of stress as beneficial,
their grades improved.

At first blush, you might assume that the statement about anxiety being beneficial
simply calmed the students, reducing their stress and allowing them to focus. But that
was not the case. Jamieson’s team took saliva samples of the students, both the day
before the practice test to set a base line, and right after reading the lines about the new
science — just moments before they started the first question. Jamieson had the saliva
tested for biomarkers that show the level of activation of the body’s sympathetic nervous
system — our “fight or flight” response. The experimental group’s stress levels were
decidedly higher. The biological stress was real, but it had different physiological
manifestations and had somehow been transformed into a positive force that drove

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Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? - NYTimes.com

performance.

If you went to an SAT testing site and could run physiological and neurological scans on
the teenagers milling outside the door right before the exam, you would observe very
different biomarkers from student to student. Those standing with shoulders hunched,
or perhaps rubbing their hands, stamping their feet to get warm, might be approaching
what Wendy Berry Mendes and colleagues call a “threat state.” According to Mendes, an
associate professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, the
hallmark of a threat state is vasoconstriction — a tightening of the smooth muscles that
line every blood vessel in the body. Blood pressure rises; breathing gets shallow.
Oxygenated blood levels drop, and energy supplies are reduced. Meanwhile, a rush of
hormones amplifies activity in the brain’s amygdala, making you more aware of risks
and fearful of mistakes.

At that same test center, you might see students shoulders back, chest open, putting
weight on their toes. They may be in a “challenge state.” Hormones activate the brain’s
reward centers and suppress the fear networks, so the person is excited to start in on the
test. In this state, decision making becomes automatic. The blood vessels and lungs
dilate. In a different study of stress, Jamieson found that the people told to feel positive
about being anxious had their blood flow increase by an average of more than half a liter
per minute, with more oxygen and energy coursing throughout the body and brain.
Some had up to two liters per minute extra.

Jamieson is frustrated that our culture has such a negative view of stress: “When people
say, ‘I’m stressed out,’ it means, ‘I’m not doing well.’ It doesn’t mean, ‘I’m excited — I
have increased oxygenated blood going to my brain. ”

As the doors to the test center open, the line between challenge and threat is thin.
Probably nothing induces a threat state more than feeling you can’t make any mistakes.
Threat physiology can be activated with the sense of being judged, or anything that
triggers the fear of disappointing others. As a student opens his test booklet, threat can
flare when he sees a subject he has recently learned but hasn’t mastered. Or when he
sees a problem he has no idea how to solve.

Armando Rodriguez graduated last spring from Bright Star Secondary Charter
Academy in Los Angeles, but he is waiting until next fall to start college. He is not taking
a gap year to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He’s recuperating from knee
surgery for a bone condition, spending his days in physical therapy. And what does he
miss about being out of school? Competing.

“It’s an adrenaline rush — like no other thing.” He misses being happy when he wins. He
even misses losing. “At least it was a feeling you got,” he said. “It made you want to be
better, the next time.” Without a competitive goal, he feels a little adrift. He finds himself
mentally competing with other physical-therapy patients.

Rodriguez recorded a 3.86 G.P.A. his senior year of high school and was a defender for
the school soccer team. The knee injury happened during a stint on the school’s football
team: his doctor had warned that it was too risky to play, but “I just had to try,” he said.
He used to constantly challenge his friends on quiz grades; it’s how they made
schoolwork fun.

But when he took the SAT last year, he experienced a different sensation. “My heart was
racing,” he said. “I had butterflies.” Occasionally, he’d look up from his exam to see
everyone else working on their own tests: they seemed to be concentrating so hard and
answering questions faster than he was. “What if they’re doing way better than me?”
immediately led to the thought, “These people are smarter than me. All the good schools
are going to want them, and not me.” Within seconds, he arrived at the worst possible

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Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? - NYTimes.com

outcome: his hopes of a good college would be gone.

It might seem surprising that the same student can experience competition in such
different ways. But this points to what researchers think is the difference between
competition that challenges and competition that threatens.

Taking a standardized test is a competition in which the only thing anyone cares about is
the final score. No one says, “I didn’t do that well, but it was still worth doing, because I
learned so much math from all the months of studying.” Nobody has ever come out of an
SAT test saying, “Well, I won’t get into the college I wanted, but that’s O.K. because I
made a lot of new friends at the Kaplan center.” Standardized tests lack the side benefits
of competing that normally buffer children’s anxiety. When you sign your child up for
the swim team, he may really want to finish first, but there are many other reasons to be
in the pool, even if he finishes last.

High-stakes academic testing isn’t going away. Nor should competition among students.
In fact several scholars have concluded that what students need is more academic
competition, but modeled on the kinds children enjoy.

David and Christi Bergin, professors of educational and developmental psychology at the
University of Missouri, have begun a pilot study of junior high school students
participating in math competitions. They have observed that, within a few weeks,
students were tackling more complex problems than they would even at the end of a
yearlong class. Some were even doing college-level math. That was true even for students
who didn’t like math before joining the team and were forced into it by their parents.
Knowing they were going up against other teams in front of an audience, the children
took ownership over the material. They became excited about discovering ever more
advanced concepts, having realized each new fact was another weapon in their
intellectual arsenal.

In-class spelling bees. Science fairs. Chess teams. “The performance is highly
motivating,” David Bergin says. Even if a child knows her science project won’t win the
science fair, she still gets that moment to perform. That moment can be stressful and
invigorating and scary, but if the child handles it well, it feels like a victory.

“Children benefit from competition they have prepared for intensely, especially when
viewed as an opportunity to gain recognition for their efforts and improve for the next
time,” says Rena Subotnik, a psychologist at the American Psychological Association.
Subotnik notes that scholastic competitions can raise the social status of academic work
as well as that of the contestants. Competitions like these are certainly not without
stress, but the pressure comes in predictable ebbs and flows, broken up by moments of
fun and excitement.

Maybe the best thing about academic competitions is that they benefit both Warriors
and Worriers equally. The Warriors get the thrilling intensity their minds are suited for,
where they can shine. The Worriers get the gradual stress inoculation they need, so that
one day they can do more than just tolerate stress — they can embrace it. And through
the cycle of preparation, performance and recovery, what they learn becomes ingrained.

It may be difficult to believe, as Jamieson advises, that stress can benefit your
performance. We can read it, and we can talk about it, but it’s the sort of thing that
needs to be practiced, perhaps for years, before it can become a deeply held conviction.

It turns out that Armando Rodriguez was accepted at five colleges. He rallied that day on
the SAT. It wasn’t his best score — he did better the second time around — but it was
not as bad as he feared. Rodriguez had never heard of Jeremy Jamieson. He had never
read, or ever been told, that intense stress could be harnessed to perform his best. But

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Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? - NYTimes.com

he understood it and drew strength from it. In the middle of his downward spiral of
panic, he realized something: “I’m in a competition. This is a competition. I’ve got to
beat them.”

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman are the authors of ‘‘Top Dog: The Science of
Winning and Losing.’’

Editor: Vera Titunik

A version of this article appeared in print on February 10, 2013, on page MM20 of the Sunday Magazine.

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