Research Finds MHC Students' Worries Can Block Academic Goals

Concerned about their unhappy mothers, some students do well academically, but never enjoy it because to do so feels disloyal to and distancing from Mom. Other students stop themselves from performing well because they cannot bring themselves to outachieve a parent. According to Robert Shilkret, professor of psychology and education, the theory behind these behaviors is that "students hold themselves back because of unconscious worries about their parents. They worry more about their mothers than fathers, especially if they perceive their mothers as struggling in some way. They experience feelings of conflict about abandoning or surpassing a loved one."

These striking findings come out of a five-year research project undertaken by Shilkret and his research collaborator, Ellen Nigrosh. She received her PhD while working with Shilkret and is now a therapist in private practice. Starting with the thesis that students come to college with a plan in mind for themselves, much of which is unconscious, Shilkret and Nigrosh's study painstakingly examined how a dozen subjects, now all former MHC students, lived their lives in college. They examined each student's childhood and formative experiences, including family ties, the general tone of family interaction, and parents' feelings of success and disappointment. While interviews were done in both sophomore and senior years, these findings reflect only the sophomore data.

All information was gathered in face-to-face interviews. Transcripts of the taped interviews were evaluated by four "judges," experienced clinicians who made informed clinical inferences about each student's college expectations and possible obstructions to their achievement.

"The judges were able to show that for each subject, there were approximately fifteen highly relevant goals and fifteen highly relevant obstructions to achieving these goals," says Shilkret. "All students had obstructions concerning career plans and academic work or achievement goals. We were able to show that students with low grade-point averages (GPAs) had serious obstructions actually affecting their performance, while students with higher GPAs were able to perform but expressed feelings of stress." The results based on the sophomore data will appear in the Journal of Counseling Psychology this spring.

In analyzing the senior-year data, Shilkret hopes that the early interviews will have predictive value. He wonders whether the students overcame obstructions enough to meet their unconscious goals. Shilkret would like to compare the Mount Holyoke group with men and women at a coeducational college, and also learn whether these issues affect a student's choice to attend a women's college.