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‘People can change’: Teaching teenagers to cope with social stress

NEW YORK — Ugh, life. Can teenagers learn better ways to deal with all that stress and insecurity that comes with it?

Illustration: New York Times

Illustration: New York Times

NEW YORK — Ugh, life. Can teenagers learn better ways to deal with all that stress and insecurity that comes with it?

New research suggests they can. Though academic and social pressures continue to pile on in high school, teenagers can be taught effective coping skills to skirt the pitfalls of anxiety and depression.

Mr David Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a leading voice in the growing effort to help college students stay in school, has been turning his attention to younger teenagers to help shore up their resilience at an earlier age.

His latest study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found a surprisingly effective technique. At the beginning of the school year, students participated in a reading and writing exercise intended to instill a basic, almost banal message to help them manage tension: People can change.

The students who completed the exercise subsequently had lower levels of stress, reported more confidence in coping and achieved slightly higher grades at year’s end, compared with a control group. These results were measured through the students’ self-reporting in online diaries and through cardiovascular and hormone measurements.

The studies are small. Some 60 students, recruited from the Rochester, New York, area, participated in the first trial; the second involved 205 ninth-graders from a high school in suburban Austin, Texas. In 2017, researchers will try to reproduce these results on a larger scale, in some 25 high schools across the country.

Adults played no significant part in the exercise, researchers said. Students essentially taught themselves this mental buffer, and when they were inevitably rattled by social stress, they had a reassuring interpretation ready to frame it.

Mr John Weisz, a psychology professor at Harvard who was not involved in the research, found the approach efficient and powerful. “If you’re an adolescent and you experience social harm, it’s not fixed that you will always be a target. You can change,” he said. “And over time, others can change, too. They may mellow and not be so cruel. That’s an interesting twist for kids to learn, and a good one.”

First, students read a short, engaging article about brain science, describing how personality can change. Then they read anecdotes written by seniors about high school conflicts, reflecting how they were eventually able to shrug things off and move on. Finally, the students were asked to write encouraging advice to younger students.

Mr Yeager and his colleagues have so far tried this intervention in five schools. In one study, 300 high school freshmen used this same method; nine months later, the prevalence of depression they reported was 40 per cent less than in a control group.

If the results remain robust after the 2017 trials, Mr Yeager plans to release the intervention material for free through a Stanford University project that provides learning support for students.

The breadth and depth of adolescent depression and anxiety is well established. A 2015 study found that nearly 11 per cent of teenagers experience depression; other reports have even higher figures. Between sixth and 10th grade, the rate of depression doubles for boys and nearly triples for girls. And studies show that while a large percentage of teenagers face high stress on a daily basis, rates of coping skills are weak.

Mr Yeager’s intervention suggests that if teenagers can hold onto a long view, they can soldier through immediate mortifications at the cafeteria lunch table. The takeaway: You are not doomed to be excluded forever. Neither your personality nor that of your tormentor’s is frozen. NEW YORK TIMES

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