Efforts to prevent and reduce mental health problems in youths have advanced greatly in recent years. However, these advances have not reduced rates of youth mental illness on a large scale. Thus, a great need exists for novel, scalable, and low-cost approaches to reducing mental health problems in youth. Ideally, such approaches would be mechanism-targeted: that is, they would act on specific developmental processes that underlie psychological disorders. The proposed research aims to address this need by testing whether a single-session intervention teaching incremental theories of personality, or the belief that one's personality is malleable-as opposed to entity theories of personality, or the belief that one's personality is fixed and unchangeable-can strengthen recovery from social stress and prevent the development of anxiety and depression during early adolescence. Compared to incremental theories, entity theories of personal traits have demonstrated cross-sectional and prospective relations with greater anxiety and depression in youths. Further, a single-session incremental personality theories intervention reduced the development of depressive symptoms in a community sample of adolescents, supporting these theories as powerful intervention and/or prevention targets, even when taught in a brief format. Specifically, this project has two aims. Aim 1 is to evaluate the effect of the implicit theories intervention on two candidate mechanisms of action, or targets, identified by prior research: arousal (measured via physiological reactivity following social stress) and loss (here, perceived loss of behavioral control) in youths 12-15 years of age. Following a lab-based social stress induction, I hypothesize that participants receiving the intervention will recover from stress more rapidly, as indicated by measures of arousal (heart rate variability; electrodermal activity levels) and self-reported loss (increased self-reported perceived control) compared to participants who do not receive the intervention. Aim 2 is to evaluate the effects of the single-session incremental theories intervention on anxiety and depression over a nine-month follow-up period. I will test whether the intervention, compared to a control protocol, reduces symptoms of anxiety an depression the development of anxiety and depression; I will also assess whether this change is a direct result of shifts in the two aforementioned targets (arousal; loss). I predict more positive trajectories in anxiety and depression for youth receiving the intervention, relative to those who do not receive the intervention, across nine months. I will also test whether these trajectories are mediated by changes in the targets described in Aim 1. Finally, regardless of outcomes for Aims 1 and 2, baseline, postintervention, and 9-month measures will be used to map links among implicit theories, interventions targeting those theories, social stress recovery, and youth anxiety and depression over time. Findings may suggest a cost-effective, scalable intervention that improves youth resiliency and mental health.
