Measuring the Effectiveness of a Multicomponent Program to Manage Academic Stress through a Resilience to Stress Index.

In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of a multicomponent program that includes psychoeducation in academic stress, mindfulness training, and biofeedback-assisted mindfulness, while enhancing the Resilience to Stress Index (RSI) of students through the control of autonomic recovery from psychological stress. Participants are university students enrolled in a program of excellence and are granted an academic scholarship. The dataset consists of an intentional sample of 38 undergraduate students with high academic performance, 71% (27) women, 29% (11) men, and 0% (0) non-binary, with an average age of 20 years. The group belongs to the "Leaders of Tomorrow" scholarship program from Tecnológico de Monterrey University, in Mexico. The program is structured in 16 individual sessions during an eight-week period, divided into three phases: pre-test evaluation, training program, and post-test evaluation. During the evaluation test, an assessment of the psychophysiological stress profile is performed while the participants undergo a stress test; it includes simultaneous recording of skin conductance, breathing rate, blood volume pulse, heart rate, and heart rate variability. Based on the pre-test and post-test psychophysiological variables, an RSI is computed under the assumption that changes in physiological signals due to stress can be compared against a calibration stage. The results show that approximately 66% of the participants improved their academic stress management after the multicomponent intervention program. A Welch's t-test showed a difference in mean RSI scores (t = -2.30, p = 0.025) between the pre-test and post-test phases. Our findings show that the multicomponent program promoted positive changes in the RSI and in the management of the psychophysiological responses to academic stress.

Lessons learned while preparing a tailored, self-help, technology-driven intervention for national dissemination.

Tailored health interventions have been found to be effective in various areas of health promotion because of their delivery of customized content, which focuses the prevention messages more closely on the individual's risk behavior. However, the use of tailored interventions in the prevention of STD/HIV has been limited, and there is a void in the literature on translating tailored interventions into practice. This paper discusses the process of translating a tailored, self-help, technology-driven STD/HIV prevention intervention from research-to-practice. Three agencies were selected during the translation process to test the intervention materials and provided valuable lessons learned for translating a tailored intervention into practice. A racially diverse group of more than 250 women in six states participated in the intervention during this pilot test. Lessons learned for research-to-practice efforts for tailored interventions are presented, including expanding the reach of such interventions by making them more compatible for mobile technology.