A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress.

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.

Reappraising stress arousal improves affective, neuroendocrine, and academic performance outcomes in community college classrooms.

The field experiment presented here applied a stress regulation technique to optimize affective and neuroendocrine responses and improve academic and psychological outcomes in an evaluative academic context. Community college students (N = 339) were randomly assigned to stress reappraisal or active control conditions immediately before taking their second in-class exam. Whereas stress is typically perceived as having negative effects, stress reappraisal informs individuals about the functional benefits of stress and is hypothesized to reduce threat appraisals, and subsequently, improve downstream outcomes. Multilevel models indicated that compared with controls, reappraising stress led to less math evaluation anxiety, lower threat appraisals, more adaptive neuroendocrine responses (lower cortisol and higher testosterone levels on testing days relative to baseline), and higher scores on Exam 2 and on a subsequent Exam 3. Reappraisal students also persisted in their courses at a higher rate than controls. Targeted mediation models suggested stress appraisals partially mediated effects of reappraisal. Notably, procrastination and performance approach goals (measured between exams) partially mediated lagged effects of reappraisal on subsequent performance. Implications for the stress, emotion regulation, and mindsets literatures are discussed. Moreover, alleviating negative effects of acute stress in community college students, a substantial but understudied population, has potentially important applied implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).