Improving Mental Health in Adolescent Girls via a Randomized Trial of an Emotion Mindset Intervention

To examine whether a growth emotion mindset intervention (E-MIND) protects adolescent girls exposed to high peer stress from mental health difficulties by decreasing their fixed emotion mindsets (FEMs).

One hundred sixty-three adolescent girls (M_age = 15.68 years; 8.5% Asian American; 10.4% Black; 4.3% Latine; 10.4% multiracial; 66.3% White) from the community were assigned via a random number generator to E-MIND (N = 81) or a control brain education lesson (N = 82). Participants reported on FEMs and depressive and anxiety symptoms at baseline and two follow-ups.

E-MIND predicted decreases in FEMs (b = -0.32, p = .01, β = -0.38, R² = 0.14), which protected girls against depression (b = 0.41, p =.036, β = 0.71), but not anxiety (b = 1.40, p = .35, β = 0.28); the full model accounted for R² = 0.52 and 0.16 in depression and anxiety, respectively. These effects resulted from a combination of immediate changes in FEMs and maintenance of these changes over time. Moderated-mediation analyses revealed context-specific effects, such that girls exposed to high peer stress in the E-MIND group experienced significantly lower levels of depression than those in the control group, Cohen's d = 0.34, and showed comparable levels of depression as girls exposed to low levels of peer stress in the control group, b = 0.15, p = .20, at the 4-month follow-up.

These findings suggest that a single-session E-MIND may serve as one promising approach for preventing increases in depressive symptoms in adolescent girls exposed to high peer stress.