Adolescents today are more stressed than ever, exhibiting record levels of stress-related mental health problems. Of course, there are plenty of reasons for teens to worry. A global pandemic. War in Europe, mass shootings and economic insecurity.
Add to that the effects of the 24/7 exposure to social media. Teenagers’ psychological well-being, much more so than for other age groups, is affected by how they think their social environment – peers, teachers, parents, coaches – perceives and judges them.
“We receive an endless stream of likes, dislikes and comments via social media, which makes for a constant state of social evaluation,” says Jeremy Jamieson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. “That’s probably one of the most damaging things we’ve seen for adolescents.”
The mental health crisis among teens has prompted an urgent quest for preventive interventions. Jamieson, who heads up Rochester’s Social Stress Lab, and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, and the Google Empathy Lab, believe they have one.
As the team explains in a recent study in the journal Nature, the 30-minute online training module teaches teenagers to channel their stress responses away from something negative that needs to be feared and tamped down towards recognising those responses – sweaty palms, a racing heart, for example – as a positive driving force.
The intervention works by helping teens develop what the researchers call two “synergistic mindsets”.
The first is a growth mindset, the idea that people’s intelligence can be developed in response to challenges, which helps the teenagers engage with difficult stressors. It’s “basically the belief that intellectual ability is not fixed but can be developed with effort, effective strategies, and support from others,” Jamieson says. “It’s the idea that if I push myself, I can grow, I can learn, I can improve, and I can push through difficulties.”
The second is a stress-can-be-enhancing mindset – the idea that people’s stress responses are not harmful but instead can fuel their performance by helping them persevere and take on difficult challenges. Sweaty palms, a racing heart, and deeper breathing, for example, are physiological changes that “mobilise energy and deliver oxygenated blood to the brain and tissues”, says Jamieson.
How does the ‘synergistic mindsets intervention’ work?
The researchers showed over the course of six double-blind, randomised experiments, conducted in both laboratory and field settings with a total of 4,291 young people (students in grades 8-12 and college undergraduates), that their intervention improved the participants' stress-linked health outcomes, such as their biological responses, psychological well-being, anxiety symptoms during COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as their academic performance.
One of the experiments took place at a rigorous, urban public charter high school where 95% of students are black, African-American or Hispanic/Latinx, and nearly all students (99%) come from low-income families. The researchers chose this population because students facing the combination of socioeconomic disadvantages and high academic standards are likely to face chronic, daily stressors, which have the potential to elicit negative stress responses.
The team observed striking results in the most demanding STEM courses where the intervention led to a 63% pass rate among students in the synergistic mindsets intervention group, compared to just a 47% pass rate for students in the control group.
Here’s some of what the researchers taught the teenagers during the intervention
• High school is a time when experiences of difficulty, struggle and frustration offer opportunities for personal growth.
• The stress that your body feels when you face those experiences is preparing you to learn from challenges.
• People who understand that the brain changes with learning and that the body’s stress response facilitates learning are better prepared to address the demands of high school.
• As you approach difficult challenges more often, things that used to be hard begin to feel easier. When something feels really difficult your brain learns how to respond more effectively.
Findings
The data showed that the synergistic mindsets intervention
• Improved physiological responses to stress, including increased delivery of oxygenated blood to the brain and body, and caused a faster return to the body's homeostasis after a challenging event;
• Improved psychological well-being (people felt liked, powerful, satisfied, good about themselves, had higher self-esteem, and didn't feel rejected, insecure, or disconnected);
• Reduced negative self-regard, an internalising symptom that can lead to depression;
• Increased academic achievement (measured in pass rates for core classes); and
• Decreased anxiety symptoms.
"Because mindset interventions like the one we tested could be delivered cost-effectively in national or regional scale-up studies, our research links insights about people's affect regulation with the discovery of actionable intervention methods that might be able to produce real and lasting change for a large group of people," says study coauthor David Yaeger, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who is an expert on adolescent development and well-being.
The team notes that their intervention applies to growth-promotive stressors, such as formal schooling, the acquisition of new skills, or social evaluative contexts. They caution, however, that this kind of approach would not be suitable for addressing trauma, abuse, or structural inequalities.
Study details
A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress
David S. Yeager, Christopher J. Bryan, James J. Gross, Jared S. Murray, Danielle Krettek Cobb, Pedro H. F. Santos, Hannah Gravelding, Meghann Johnson, Jeremy P. Jamieson.
Published in Nature on 6 July 2022
Abstract
Social-evaluative stressors – experiences in which people feel they could be judged negatively – pose a major threat to adolescent mental health 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 mindsets (the idea that intelligence can be developed) and stress-can-be-enhancing mindsets (the idea that one’s physiological stress response can fuel optimal performance). In six double-blind, randomised, 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 effects. Thus, our research has identified a treatment for adolescent stress that could, in principle, be scaled nationally at low cost.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Stress in adolescence key to later CVD
UK study finds increased mental health problems facing the young
Social media’s impact on mental health: An 8-year longitudinal study