A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress

Abstract

Social-evaluative stressors—experiences in which people feel they could be judged negatively—pose a major threat to adolescent mental health1–3 and can cause young people to disengage from stressful pursuits, resulting in missed opportunities to acquire valuable skills. Here we show that replicable benefits for the stress responses of adolescents can be achieved with a short (around 30-min), scalable 'synergistic mindsets' intervention. This intervention, which is a self-administered online training module, synergistically targets both growth mindsets4 (the idea that intelligence can be developed) and stress-can-be-enhancing mindsets5 (the idea that one’s physiological stress response can fuel optimal performance). In six double-blind, randomized, controlled experiments that were conducted with secondary and post-secondary students in the United States, the synergistic mindsets intervention improved stress-related cognitions (study 1, n = 2,717; study 2, n = 755), cardiovascular reactivity (study 3, n = 160; study 4, n = 200), daily cortisol levels (study 5, n = 118 students, n = 1,213 observations), psychological well-being (studies 4 and 5), academic success (study 5) and anxiety symptoms during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns (study 6, n = 341). Heterogeneity analyses (studies 3, 5 and 6) and a four-cell experiment (study 4) showed that the benefits of the intervention depended on addressing both mindsets—growth and stress—synergistically. Confidence in these conclusions comes from a conservative, Bayesian machine-learning statistical method for detecting heterogeneous effects6. Thus, our research has identified a treatment for adolescent stress that could, in principle, be scaled nationally at low cost.

Cognitive training enhances growth mindset in children through plasticity of cortico-striatal circuits

“…We suggest that interventions that combine growth mindset and cognitive training may be especially beneficial for students with learning difficulties. More generally, our findings may inform evidence-based growth mindset interventions based on notions of brain plasticity 5,7,49 .…”

Using latent profile analysis to uncover the combined role of anxiety sensitivity and test anxiety in students’ state anxiety

“…Furthermore, efforts should be undertaken to intervene across elementary and secondary schools and particularly in public schools, as our results showed that students’ susceptibility to anxiety did not vary as a function of school level, whereas students in private schools were underrepresented in the Double-susceptibility profile. Finally, as our results showed that girls were only overrepresented in the Double-and Unique-susceptibility to anxiety sensitivity profiles, interventions teaching girls that bodily manifestations of anxiety are normal and even desirable might help to reduce their fear of anxiety and could be highly beneficial ( Yeager et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Although adaptative levels of stress and anxiety have been shown to provide advantages such as enhanced productivity, facilitated performance, and active coping ( Dienstbier, 1989 ; Cassady and Johnson, 2002 ; Jamieson, 2017 ; Crum et al, 2020 ), most studies in the field have focused on the harmful effects of stress and anxiety on physical and mental health, and on cognitive performance ( Johns et al, 2008 ; Liu and Vickers, 2015 ; Crum et al, 2020 ). This speaks to the common misleading mindset that “stress and anxiety should be avoided at all costs” ( Pope, 2003 ; Yeager et al, 2022 ) that might condition some students to perceive their bodily manifestations of anxiety as threats (anxiety sensitivity). Importantly, students who fear bodily manifestations of anxiety have been shown to experience more intense anxious states.…”

Stan and BART for Causal Inference: Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Using the Power of Stan and the Flexibility of Machine Learning

“…In the standard implementation, however, the errors were assumed to be independent. Multilevel extensions to BCF (random intercepts and varying slopes on treatment assignment) have been used in applied work [ 28 , 29 , 30 ] but no software has been made available.…”