Conference Agenda

Student burnout has been one of the most pertinent foci of discussion around Finnish adolescent’s’ wellbeing since the turn of the millennium (e.g., Salmela-Aro et al., 2009). Even if the onset of the growing unwell-being coincides with young people’s increasing dependence on social media and concern for various global problems, the nametag set on the phenomenon has been school burnout. The term has been further accentuated since a 2018 reform of higher education student admission, which shifted the emphasis from an earlier entrance examination-based policy to admitting half of new students based on their results in the national end-of-upper-secondary-school matriculation examination. The reform is seen to increase students’ stress both during their studies and in the matriculation examination (see Kupiainen et al., 2016).

The current study is part of a wider research project on the impact of the 2018 reform on upper secondary schools and on students’ study choices and wellbeing. In the present paper, we explore the validity of the emphasis on the school as the basis of student burnout (see also Kosola, 2022). For that, we enriched the instrument measuring burnout with outside-of-school topics such as climate change and the current geo-political situation expected to darken young people’s views on the world around them.

Burnout was first diagnosed in care and other human service occupations, and primarily attributed to the emotional exhaustion caused by the work (Maslach et al., 2001). Originally an ill-defined empirical concept, burnout was soon found to comprise three core dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy. The construct was soon adopted also for upper secondary and tertiary level students. While adult burnout was seen to be fueled by the rapidly changing and increasing demands of working life, students’ increasing ill-being needed a differing base for explanation. After all, unlike employees threatened by burnout under demands coming from above, students are living through a period where the focus is on the process of building their own lives. By emphasizing this difference, we do not wish to imply that the expectations set on young people in today’s world – or even school – might not feel overpowering for many. However, not all researchers in the field are disposed to use the term burnout to describe the stress and psychosomatic symptoms ailing today’s youth (e.g., Moksnes et al., 2010; Schraml et al., 2011). Regardless the terminology used, researchers in the Nordic welfare states are especially active in the field. This can be found surprising in view of the Nordic comprehensive education systems’ emphasis on equality and wellbeing with a stress on supporting everyone’s learning.

Contrary to most other countries, the best school-related trend data in Finland does not regard learning outcomes but student health and wellbeing (THL; Vainikainen et al., 2017). Since the 2018 reform of higher education student admission, upper secondary students’ wellbeing and burnout have been an especially acute topic of discussion. By increasing the role of the matriculation examination in student admission, the reform is seen to increase students’ stress regarding both their course choices during upper secondary education and, subsequently, their choices for the subject-specific exams they will include in their matriculation examination.

In this paper, we will investigate students and teachers’ views on possible reasons for the much discussed student burnout (a ready-provided list covering school and out-of-school related factors and general issues). Secondly, we will relate students’ views to their course choices and attainment, and to the choice of exams they plan to include in their matriculation examination. Thirdly, we will look at student burnout through an adapted 9-item School Burnout Inventory covering the three dimension of exhaustion, cynicism and experienced inadequacy.

Adolescent sleep has declined significantly over the past 20 years (Keyes, Maslowsky, Hamilton & Schulenberg 2015). Inadequate and poor-quality sleep appears to be associated with both reduced motivation (Zhao et al. 2019) and impaired cognitive abilities that are important for learning and academic performance (Hysing, Harvey, Linton, Askeland & Sivertsen 2016; Kuula et al. 2015).

Developmental hormonal changes shift the sleep-wake cycle towards eveningness during adolescence. Morningness starts to decline around 12 years of age, continuing until late adolescence and early adulthood (Roenneberg et al. 2007). Many adolescents have difficulty falling asleep at the desired time on school nights. A Finnish population-based study showed that the later adolescents went to bed, the lower their sleep quality and the greater their daytime sleepiness was. This in turn was reflected in lower school performance and motivation (Merikanto et al. 2013). The effects of sleep deprivation and poor sleep quality extend to all areas of life, including learning, motivation, and well-being. Moreover, inadequate and poor-quality sleep increases daytime sleepiness, which can be reflected in lower school performance and motivation.

The use of various screens in the evening is unfortunately common among young people, delaying their bedtime (Bartel, Gradisar & Williamson 2015). Digital media use affects young people through a variety of mechanisms, such as exposure to blue light (Crowley, Cain, Burns, Acebo & Carskadon 2015) and emotions which increase alertness (Scott & Woods 2019). Although circadian rhythms operate independently of environmental factors, artificial light can modify individual sleep-wake rhythms (Gooley 2008; Roenneberg, Daan & Merrow 2003). Daytime exposure to light is preferable, as exposure to light during the evening or night inhibits melatonin release in the evening, making it more difficult to fall asleep. Exposure to blue light before bedtime may also affect sleep architecture, for example by shortening REM (rapid eye movement) sleep (Higuchi et al. 2005), which is crucial for the development of the young brain and also affects the ability to learn new things (Li et al. 2017).

The use of digital media devices both during the day and at night has been associated with insufficient sleep in previous studies. It is therefore important to investigate how young people's circadian rhythms and sleep are associated with the use of digital devices and apps. This study targeted to investigate how sleep and circadian rhythms are related to digital technology use at school and during leisure time. Q1: How do sleep and fatigue during the school week differ across chronotypes? Q2: How is the amount of use of digital devices or apps during schooldays and leisure time associated with sleep and fatigue in adolescents?

It is a common belief that new generations of children are in decline (Protzko & Schooler, 2019). However, contrary to the belief that new generations decline, children’s ability to delay gratification, measured by the famous ‘Marshmallow Test’, for example, has actually improved from the 1960s to the 2010s (Protzko, 2020). This means that (at least when it comes to food) young children today can resist rewards for a longer time than they did 50 years ago. This might be mainly due to an improvement in the living standards of families, an increase in parental educational level, the number of years children spend in education, and improvements in nutrition and healthcare services (Protzko, 2020). This increase in delay of gratification ability is similar to the ’Flynn effect’ which refers to the sustained increase in intelligence and cognitive domains worldwide during the 20th century (Pietschnig & Gittler, 2015). However, since the 2000s, stagnation or even reversal in intelligence (Dutton et al., 2016), attention, and working memory (Graves et al., 2021; Wongupparaj et al., 2017) have been observed in many countries worldwide, named as the ’negative Flynn effect’.

Along with the ’negative Flynn effect’, there have been other problematic trends reported among young adults, for example, self-reported loneliness has been increasing (Buecker et al., 2021), and emotional intelligence-related traits like well-being, self-control, and emotionality have been decreasing (Khan et al., 2021), with a similar negative trend in resilience (Zhao et al., 2022). These changes over the last decades have been proposed to be caused by complex twofold changes on the level of individuals and their environment (Buecker et al., 2021; Graves et al., 2021; Khan et al., 2021; Zhao et al., 2022). According to the mutual constitution model (Markus & Kitayama, 2010), the socio-cultural environment of different time periods is likely to shape the individual with its problems and vice-versa.

Importantly, these negative trends affecting the mental health of youth can be reversed with targeted interventions or prevention programs in education and/or healthcare. Yet, there is a lack of comprehensive research about time trend changes in childhood and adolescence regarding emotional and behavioral problems. Consequently, the aim of the present meta-analysis was to explore cross-temporal changes in the emotional and behavioral functioning of European children and adolescents and reveal if there are any specific problems that are on the rise and require immediate attention.

How to increase rates of school prosocial behavior is an abiding concern to society and is of considerable interest to educational scholars and stakeholders. In the last decades, research on prosociality in schools focuses on social interactions among children, from the very early stages of development onward. It was found that factors such as peer relations, group affiliation, and social status, may prevent or activate prosocial behavior (Sabato & Kogut, 2021)– with significant implications for school climate, academic success and personal well-being (Schonert-Reichl, 2017). One of the salient findings in this field of research is that higher-status children are perceived by their friends and teachers to be more helpful, cooperative, and kind (van den Berg et al., 2015), and tend to a sharing behavior more than lower-status children (Sabato & Kogut, 2021). However, this link is not straightforward (Warden & MacKinnon, 2003) and contextual variables that determine when social status encourages or hinders prosociality should be examined.

It has been suggested that the effect of social status on prosociality may be dependent on the characteristics of the beneficiary and that children are more prosaically toward their in-group members, known as in-group favoritism (e.g., Sabato & Kogut, 2021). This effect may be even more substantial when the beneficiary is from a stereotyped group (Zimmerman & Levy, 2000). Nevertheless, several contextual factors may attenuate in-group preference. For example, in-group favoritism was found to be significant only among children in the higher social status group (Newheiser et al., 2014; Sabato & Kogut, 2021). In addition, introducing specific out-group stereotypes, increased the incidents of children helping a needy out-group member more than an in-group member, although the children held a negative conception of the out-group member (Sierksma, 2022). These findings, altogether, indicate that social status and the beneficiary’s characteristics have an interaction effect on prosocial behavior.

The current study aims to understand the effect of social status on social orientation toward in-group versus out-group members, and toward stereotyped versus neutral individuals, among children between the ages of ten to eleven, since social status becomes relatively stable from the fourth grade onward (Poulin & Chan, 2010). Although previous studies pointed to the relationship between social status and prosociality, along with the effect of such situational factors, most of them are based on evaluations by peers and teachers of the children’s general tendencies of prosociality or self-report, rather than measure overt behavior. In order to examine overt behavior, we use the Social Mindfulness paradigm (SoMi; Van Doesum et al., 2013) which provides individuals with a choice between a mindful/ cooperative decision and a self-centered decision.

Several studies applied this task among adults and showed that the socially mindful person is also scored high in the HEXACO personality inventory which measures factors related to respect for others and their perspective on the world, and other-oriented intention (i.e., honesty-humility, agreeableness, fairness, sentimentality, forgiveness, flexibility). This finding supports the idea that social mindfulness is rooted in benevolent prosocial motivations (Van Doesum et al., 2013). Only one study, to date, used this task among children and examined judgments of a third party’s behavior in hypothetical scenarios (see Zhao et al., 2021). This study indicated that, by age 6, children understand the task and its meaning, and positively evaluate a character who takes a snack for herself in a way that leaves a choice for others over a character who leaves no choice. The present study will be the first to utilize the SoMi task and examine self-oriented versus other-oriented decision-making among children while considering their social status in the class.