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

Summary

Students in marginalized communities who 'strive' to rise above adversity 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 Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) who exhibit a "striving persistent behavioral style" in the face of adversity 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 BIPOC. The proposed Project STRIVE (STudents RIsing aboVE) will identify BIPOC students who are academically resilient in the face of disadvantage 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, socioeconomically disadvantaged Black, Latinx and Asian American 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 BIPOC 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.

Conditions

• Internalizing Mental Health Symptoms
• Allostatic Load
• Health Complaints

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

STRIVE

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 BIPOC 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.

BEHAVIORAL

Study Skills

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.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Claremont McKenna College

  collaborator OTHER

• Fuller Seminary

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Stanford University

  collaborator OTHER

• University of California, Los Angeles

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Anna S Lau, PhD · University of California, Los Angeles

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

13 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-01-09

Primary Completion

2027-06-30

Completion

2027-06-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations