Believing People Can Change: A Randomized Controlled Trial of an Incremental Theory Intervention in Adolescence

Adolescents experience many major life transitions during high school, including changes in educational settings, living arrangements, and social and romantic relationships. While these transitions may be experienced as positive new beginnings for some youth, others experience them as stressful and challenging. Further, the developmental period of adolescence is characterized by an increased risk for the development of mental illnesses such as depression. In the context of widely-accepted cognitive models of adolescent depression, adolescents with pre-existing vulnerabilities for depression (e.g., negative self beliefs) may be more prone to experience certain life transitions as especially stressful, and this vulnerability/environment combination is likely to bring about depressive symptomatology for vulnerable youth. Thus, there is a pressing need to better understand factors that not only protect youth from mental illness during transitions, but also factors that promote resilience and well-being. Indeed, high schools are eager to address student mental illness and find better ways of promoting mental health and well-being in schools.

This project employs clinical, cognitive, developmental, and positive psychology theories in an attempt to better understand factors that may be important for adolescent mental illness and mental health during this important time of transition. Specifically, we aim to examine the utility of a brief online educational intervention for promoting adolescent mental health during important life transitions.

One important factor that appears to be associated with wellbeing and resilience is that of beliefs about growth and response to failure. Individuals often respond to challenge by either a) retreating and/or making negative attributions about themselves or others, or b) view challenge as an opportunity for learning and growth, and not consider failure to be an indication of personal shortcomings. The difference between these two responses to challenge reflects beliefs about the malleability of personal characteristics; these beliefs are referred to as "implicit theories" or more colloquially "mindset". Those who hold "entity" theories (fixed mindset) believe personal characteristics are stable and unchanging, while those with a malleable or "incremental theories" (growth mindset) believe personal characteristics are changeable and can be developed through effort and learning . Research has broadly suggested that those with entity theories may be more prone to experience difficulties and be at risk for mental illness, while those with incremental theories experience greater resilience and well-being.

Previous research has indicated that incremental theory can be taught via educational interventions, and increasing belief in incremental theory has been associated with positive effects. Further, integrating positive psychology into educational institutions to foster youth development has been recommended by many researchers. Youth spend substantial amounts of time in school, making schools an appropriate setting for interventions that aim to promote well-being and prevent mental illness. Thus, this study will test the effects of a brief implicit theory intervention on well-being and depressive symptoms.The intervention is similar to previous implicit theory interventions and teaches youth an incremental theory of socially relevant characteristics (i.e., that people can change and that personal attributes are malleable).

Implicit theory of personality (ie, beliefs about the malleability of personal attributes and socially relevant characteristics) has also been associated with depressive symptoms in youth. In a study of grade 9 students, researchers found that a brief intervention that taught incremental theory of personality (that personal attributes can grow and change) was associated with stability of reported levels of depressive symptoms over 9 months. In this intervention, students read a compelling article that demonstrated incremental theory of either personality (experimental) or athletic ability (control), then students were asked to summarize the lesson of the article and apply their own experience. Over time (9 months) those in the control condition showed an increase in depressive symptoms while those exposed to the incremental theory of personality did not show the same increase, and incidence of clinically significant depressive symptoms remained stable. The increase seen in the control group was noted to be proportional to that commonly experienced by those transitioning to high school, suggesting the intervention may have promise for successfully ameliorating developmentally typical increases in depressive symptoms. Although this brief intervention was associated with significant positive outcomes, replication and application to other samples at risk for depressive symptoms (such as youth transitioning out of high school and to post secondary education) is warranted. Towards this end, the current study will examine the impact of an intervention that teaches incremental theory on well-being and depressive symptoms in students in the first and last years of high school.