Students Rising Above: Offsetting the Health and Mental Health Costs of Resilience

Conditions

• Allostatic Load
• Health Complaints
• Internalizing Mental Health Symptoms

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

ALL

Age

13 Years - N/A

Healthy Volunteers

Accepted

Interventions

• STRIVE — BEHAVIORAL
  The STRIVE intervention will include all activities and BREATHE skill training components of L2B with content framed within the needs of high achieving college-bound students who can benefit from health promoting practices to offset the costs of resilience. The intervention will include twelve 60-minute group sessions, with two sessions on each of the six core themes. Each session will include an opening mindful movement, short didactic presentation of the topic or theme of that week, group activities that illustrate the theme, guided discussion about the activity, and in-session group mindfulness meditation practice.
• Study Skills — BEHAVIORAL
  The sessions will focus on goal setting (4 sessions), organization and time management (3 sessions), and study skills for reading comprehension, writing papers, note-taking, and test-taking (4 sessions). Parallel to the final L2B session, the last meeting will include activities to share and reflect on how students plan to incorporate and sustain new skills.

Study Details

Students who 'strive' to rise above significant stressors to achieve academic success are considered 'resilient'. However, youths' resilience in one domain (i.e. academic) can come at a cost in other domains including physical and mental health morbidities that are under-identified and under-treated. Previous research suggests that individuals from populations experiencing documented health disparities who exhibit a "striving persistent behavioral style" in the face of stress evince later health morbidities. Ironically, the same self-regulatory skills that promote academic achievement amid chronic stress can also result in physiological dysregulation that harms health and mental health. Self-regulatory processes that involve emotion suppression, experiential avoidance, and unmodulated perseverance can culminate in allostatic load which fuels health disparities and internalizing symptoms of depression and anxiety. The proposed mechanistic trial will utilize mindfulness training to permit examination of questions about the causal role of emotion regulation strategies linked to the striving persistent behavioral style in driving mental health and health morbidities among individuals from populations experiencing documented health disparities. The proposed Project STRIVE (STudents RIsing aboVE) will identify students who are academically resilient in the face of stress and will offer a tailored mindfulness intervention targeting self-regulation processes as a putative mechanism to interrupt the links between the striving persistent behavioral style and negative health outcomes. Investigators propose a multisite randomized trial randomizing 504 high achieving Black, Latinx, or Asian America/Pacific Islander students in 18 schools to receive a mindfulness intervention or an attention control condition focused on study skills. The study will: (1) test the effects of the STRIVE intervention on putative self-regulation mechanisms (emotion suppression, experiential avoidance, and unmodulated perseverance) among identified students, (2) test the effects of the STRIVE intervention on health and mental health outcomes at 12-month post-treatment, including biomarkers of allostatic load (cortisol, blood pressure, body-mass-index, waist/hip/neck circumference), health complaints, and internalizing symptoms, and (3) examine the mechanistic model linking striving persistent behavioral style and health outcomes within the STRIVE trial.

Key Dates

Start date

Jan 9, 2023

Status verified

Mar 2026

Primary completion

Jun 30, 2027

Completion

Jun 30, 2027

Study Design

Enrollment

504 participants (estimated)

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Intervention model

PARALLEL

Primary purpose

PREVENTION

Arms

• Experimental: STRIVE
  Based on the Learning to BREATHE (L2B) curriculum (Broderick, 2013), the STRIVE intervention is a mindfulness-based program designed to facilitate the development of emotion regulation for middle to high school students. Goals of the program include helping students understand their thoughts and feelings, learning how to use mindfulness-based skills to manage emotions, and providing opportunities for guided group mindfulness meditation practice. Delivered in twelve 60-minute group sessions, the intervention will be include the core components of the L2B program (i.e. body awareness; understanding and working with thoughts; understanding and working with feelings; integrating awareness of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations; reducing harmful self-judgments, and integrating mindful awareness into daily life) with content framed around the needs of high achieving, college-bound students with the goal of offsetting the costs of resilience.
• Placebo Comparator: Study Skills
  The attention control condition will incorporate face-valid content to support college readiness and achievement in twelve 60- minute group sessions. Twelve sessions will cover the SOAR study skills curriculum (Kruger, 2017), including goal-setting, organization and time-management, and study skills for reading comprehension, writing papers, note-taking, and test-taking.

Primary Outcome Measure

Change in Internalizing Symptoms over time [ Time Frame: Collected at baseline, Mid-Assessment (Week 6), Post-Assessment (Week 13), and 12 month follow up ]

Central Contacts

• Anna S Lau, PhD
  (310) 206-5363
  [email protected]

Locations (1)

Find similar trials in Los Angeles, CA

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