Poster #165 - A large-scale replication of a growth mindset of personality intervention to improve adolescents’ daily stress appraisals

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Prevention and Interventions

Integrative Statement

The transition to high school is often characterized as a stressful period involving various social-emotional challenges while forming and maintaining friendships (Yeager, 2017; Crosnoe, 2011). Although many adolescents may struggle with worsening social demands at the offset of school transition, they might differ in how they interpret the meaning of struggles. When adolescents internalize initial threats (such as being excluded, or left out from peers) to some fixed “deficiency” in their traits, current difficulties may seem like a permanent fate, creating more stress and helpless reactions. In contrast, when adolescents believe that people can change—known as a growth mindset of personality (Dweck, 1995; Chiu, Dweck, & Hong, 1997), they might stay more optimistic, because situations can improve.
Past research (Yeager, Lee, & Jamieson, 2016; Schleider & Weisz, 2016) has shown that teaching a growth mindset of personality can reduce adolescents’ maladaptive stress responses at the face of socially stressful situations. The primary goal of the present study is to replicate the treatment effects reported in Yeager et al. 2016, Study 2 in improving adolescents’ naturalistic stress appraisals. Moreover, the study seeks to extend our knowledge by identifying moderating mechanisms and boundary conditions of a growth mindset treatment with a large, heterogeneous sample of adolescents. To these ends, we conducted a large-scale, randomized field experiment across 6 high schools involving approximately 1,116 ninth-grade adolescents, with over 8,800 daily observations. We pre-registered our hypotheses (https://osf.io/d2ua7/) that teaching a growth mindset of personality might reduce maladaptive threat appraisals, thinking that one cannot handle the demands of daily negative social events.
Ninth-grade adolescents (N=1,116, mean age 14.4, 51% girls, 33% Hispanic/Black) were recruited from six urban public high schools in Texas during the 2016-2018 school years. Participants were randomly assigned to complete an online program of a growth mindset of personality treatment or active control condition at the beginning of school year. Treatment group learned to endorse a possibility that people’s social traits are malleable. About a month later, participants completed a daily diary over 10 days where they reported positive and negative events happened each day; and how they appraised the events.
Our pre-registered multilevel mixed-effects model found a significant Treatment x Intensity of Daily Negative Social Events interaction on daily threat appraisals over 10 days, unstandardized B= -0.08, P < .01. That is, treatment weakened threat appraisals on days with intense negative social events, relative to control group (see Table 1). Moreover, students’ pre-treatment depressive symptoms significantly moderated treatment effects on threat appraisals, 3-way interaction B= .26, P < .001, suggesting that treatment was more effective at reducing threat appraisals among depressed youths (see Figure 1). Finally, treatment also increased a tendency to perceive more positive events, B= .16, P < .01; and enhanced positive emotions, B= .04, P= .02.
In conclusion, our findings successfully replicated and extended previous research (Yeager et al., 2016; Yeager et al., 2015) by showing that teaching more malleable mindsets promoted a healthy school transition by attenuating maladaptive stress responses, while enhancing more optimistic outlooks.

Authors

• Hae Yeon Lee, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Mallory Dobias, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jeremy P. Jamieson, University of Rochester
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christopher G. Beevers, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert A. Josephs, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Harry T. Reis, University of Rochester
  Non-Presenting Author

• David S. Yeager, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author