Resilience-Building for Mental Health among Early Childhood Educators: A Systematic Review and Pilot-Study towards an EEG-VR Resilience Building Intervention

Abstract

Resilience is a key factor that reflects a teacher’s ability to utilize their emotional resources and working skills to provide high-quality teaching to children. Resilience-building interventions aim to promote positive psychological functioning and well-being. However, there is lack of evidence on whether these interventions improve the well-being or mental health of teachers in early childhood education (ECE) settings. This review examined the overall effectiveness of resilience-building interventions conducted on teachers working in the ECE field. A systematic approach is used to identify relevant studies that focus on resilience-building in countering work stress among early childhood educators. Findings from this review observed a preference of group approaches and varying durations of interventions. This review highlights the challenges of the group approach which can lead to lengthy interventions and attrition amongst participants. In addition to the concerns regarding response bias from self-report questionnaires, there is also a lack of physiological measures used to evaluate effects on mental health. The large efforts by 11 studies to integrate multiple centres into their intervention and the centre-based assessment performed by four studies highlight the need for a centre-focused approach to build resilience among teachers from various ECE centres. A pilot study is conducted to evaluate the feasibility of an integrated electroencephalography–virtual reality (EEG-VR) approach in building resilience in teachers, where the frontal brain activity can be monitored during a virtual classroom task. Overall, the findings of this review propose the integration of physiological measures to monitor changes in mental health throughout the resilience-building intervention and the use of VR as a tool to design a unique virtual environment.

Psychological and physiological stress and stressors in early childhood educators: An observational pilot study

“…Gratitude interventions for depression and anxiety may be minimally helpful (Cregg & Cheavens, 2021). Further, resilience programs for ECEs have mixed results (Abu Hasan et al, 2022) and some may unintentionally cause more stress (Lang et al, 2020). This may be because, given the need to manage multiple stressors while financially strapped, ECEs are already resilient.…”

Building Resilience: Psychological Approaches to Prevent Burnout in Health Professionals

“…Resilient individuals utilize positive emotions to bounce back from negative emotional experiences, as proposed by (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). These interventions aim to promote positive psychological functioning and well-being, particularly in the face of stress and adversity (Hasan et al, 2022). For instance, psychological resilience-building interventions have been found to be effective in promoting resilience and reducing depression, anxiety, and stress among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Wu et al, 2022).…”

Impact of Perceived Skillset and Organizational Traits on Digital Wellbeing of Teachers: Mediating Role of Resilience

“…As it is an immensely growing field, therefore, administrators highly need to pay the attention to its corresponding policies, being more concerted to the wellbeing of teachers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, (Abu Hasan et al, 2022 ) reported on the rising number of instructors being employed in public and private institutes at all levels, and how the stress rate during lockdown was dangerously high among those teachers, at 89 percent. With such a large workforce in the department, it must be handled immediately by guaranteeing the best possible use of technology to avoid more economic disasters.…”