Hannah Gravelding’s research while affiliated with University of Rochester and other places

Social-evaluative stressors—experiences when the self could be negatively judged by others—pose a major threat to adolescent health via their effects on internalizing disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Preventative interventions to help adolescents improve their responses to social-evaluative stressors, however, have rarely been effective. Here we show that replicable benefits for adolescents’ stress responses can be achieved with a short (~30-minute), scalable synergistic mindsets intervention. This intervention, which is a self-administered online training module, synergistically targets both growth mindsets (the idea that people’s intelligence can be developed in response to challenge) and stress-can-be-enhancing mindsets (the idea that people’s stress responses can fuel optimal performance). In six double-blind, randomized, controlled experiments conducted with youth in grades 8-12 and in undergraduate education, the synergistic mindsets intervention improved stress-related cognitions—the immediate target of the intervention (Studies 1-2, N = 3,472)—and a cascade of stress-linked outcomes: cardiovascular reactivity (Studies 3, N = 160; Study 4, N = 200), cortisol levels (Study 5, N = 118 students, n = 1,213 observations), psychological well-being (Studies 4-5), course pass rates (Study 5), and anxiety symptoms during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns (Study 6, N = 341). Evidence that the two mindsets worked synergistically came from heterogeneity analyses showing stronger effects among participants holding both negative mindsets at baseline (Studies 3, 5, and 6) and from a four-cell experiment that showed stronger effects of the synergistic mindsets intervention relative to changing single mindsets alone (Study 4). Confidence in these conclusions is rooted in a conservative, Bayesian machine-learning statistical method for detecting heterogeneous effects.

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) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).