Thriving under pressure: The effects of stress-related wise interventions on affect, sleep, and exam performance for college students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Abstract

Nearly all students experience stress as they pursue important academic goals. Because stress can be magnified for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, it becomes important to identify interventions that can help mitigate this stress, particularly for these populations as they enter academic environments. We examine the effects of stress mindset and stress management interventions administered to students from disadvantaged backgrounds (N = 140) before freshman year. We compare effects on affect, sleep, and performance during end-of-year exams seen in a subset of these students who could be tracked via experience sampling (N = 57) to those of a comparison group at the same elite university (N = 74) receiving no such stress interventions. As predicted, we find significant differences in exam-week positive affect between the stress mindset and comparison groups. However, there was no difference in positive affect between the stress mindset and management groups or the stress management and comparison groups. For negative affect, stress, sleep, and exam performance, we find no significant differences between any of the three groups. However, both stress interventions decoupled the significant negative association between exam-week stress and exam performance exhibited by the comparison group, rendering the relationship nonsignificant. The reduction in this association was somewhat more pronounced for the mindset relative to the management group. These findings suggest that mindset and management approaches both confer benefits in certain circumstances and highlight the potential value of targeting mindsets about stress using a “wise intervention” approach for students from disadvantaged backgrounds during stressful times.

Protecting healthcare workers' mental health against COVID‐19‐related stress: The effects of stress mindset and psychological resilience

“…However, compared to several support systems, programs, and exercises provided during the pandemic (Capraz et al, 2020; Zhou et al, 2020), stress mindset interventions require minimal effort and repetition to instill a durable stress‐is‐enhancing mindset. For example, watching three 3‐minute videos on the enhancing effects of stress can have enduring results over a week (Crum et al, 2013), 3 weeks (Yeager et al, 2022), and even a year (Goyer et al, 2022). Thus, we argue that stress mindset interventions to improve mental health represent a feasible and practical option that healthcare workers can adopt and use, which deserves to be tested by future scholarly inquiry.…”

Evaluation of the “rethink stress” mindset intervention: A metacognitive approach to changing mindsets.

“…One’s mindset clearly plays an important role in shaping one’s responses to stress, but how does one come to hold the mindset that stress is enhancing? Cross-sectional studies reveal that most individuals in the United States hold the mindset that stress is debilitating, including large samples of college students (Goyer et al, 2022), adult employees (Crum et al, 2013), and adolescents (D. Park et al, 2017), whose mean stress mindset scores on the stress mindset measure (SMM) consistently reflect a debilitating view of stress (Crum et al, 2013).…”