In our Study of the Day feature series, we highlight a research publication related to a John Templeton Foundation-supported project, connecting the fascinating and unique research we fund to important conversations happening around the world.
Imagine your adolescent self being forced to give a speech in front of a pair of experts, who watch unsympathetically with crossed arms and furrowed brows. When you finish, they demand that you do a series of math problems as quickly as possible. Every time you get a wrong answer, they make you start over.
If it sounds like a stress dream, you’re not far off. But the scenario was real for several dozen students who participated in one of a series of carefully designed studies in 2019 and 2020 that tested whether a simple 30-minute online intervention could provide lasting positive mental and physical effects in how young people deal with stress and anxiety.
A synergistic approach
The project, carried out by University of Texas psychologist David Yeager and published in Nature, tested the benefits of a synergistic intervention that teaches students about two mindsets: the idea that intelligence can be developed (growth mindset), and the idea that psychological stress can help us improve (stress-can-be-enhancing mindset). The training included information and testimonials about the mindsets and asked students to briefly reflect on how they might be applied in their own lives. Yeager et al. theorized that it would be especially valuable to combine the two mindset interventions: adolescents needed to hear both that they could grow by trying difficult things,
and that their minds’ and bodies’ stress responses weren’t always a hazard to be avoided but could be a resource.
This intervention was tested in a double-blind fashion, with neutral controls as well as versions that emphasized only one of the two targeted mindsets. Across six studies involving thousands of U.S. high school and college students, the researchers measured a range of results, including self-reported anxiety, and academic performance, as well as physiological measures of social stress and threat response, including heart rate, cortisol levels, and vascular resistance.
The studies found with high confidence that the synergistic intervention led to lasting positive mental and physical effects, measurable weeks or even months later. The combined mindset intervention was by far the most helpful, and the students who benefited most from it were those who had negative mindsets before the intervention.
In one of the studies, the intervention happened to have been given to participants in January 2020, a couple of months before the COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect. The situation provided an unexpected window into how mindset training prepared young people to deal with a stressful and unprecedented situation. The results showed that the intervention helped the students both with their experience of anxiety and with academic outcomes. Months later, the intervention, with no additional reinforcement, had increased the students’ overall pass rate for their core classes by 14.4 percent.
Telling a different story about stress and difficulty
“[T]he public discourse is at present operating under a flawed narrative about young people and what they are capable of,” the authors write.
“Our studies suggest that we might not teach adolescents that they are too fragile to overcome difficult struggles,
but that we might, instead, provide them with the resources and guidance that they need to unleash their skills and creativity in addressing big problems.”
Adolescence has always been hard, and in recent years, outside stressors ranging from COVID-19 to toxic social media have added new challenges. Thankfully, studies like Yeager’s point to hope that there are ways teenagers (and, likely, adults) can become better prepared to approach difficulty and anxiety. With the proper frame of mind — helped along by practical, scalable interventions — scenarios that at first might seem like a bad dream can become opportunities for growth.
Still Curious?
- Read “A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress”
- Learn more about the researchers’ synergistic mindsets intervention
- Read Yeager’s book 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People
Nate Barksdale writes about the intersection of science, history, philosophy, faith, and popular culture. He was editor of the magazine re:generation quarterly and is a frequent contributor to History.com.
