A Brief Acceptance Intervention for Stress to Improve Students' Well-Being

VU University of Amsterdam

Status: Completed

Conditions: Stress

Treatments: Behavioral: Psychoeducation; Behavioral: Brief Acceptance Intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT06335615

FMG-5790_2023

Details and patient eligibility

About

The goal of this randomized controlled trial is to test a brief psychological intervention that focusses on acceptance of stress in a student population. The main questions it aims to answer are:

• Does this brief acceptance intervention increase the well-being of students in the short term?
• By which mechanisms does this effect occur?
• What are moderating factors of this effect?

Half of the participants follow a one-hour intervention, which includes

• psychoeducation and metaphors about stress and how acceptance can help to deal with it
• experiential exercises
• mindfulness meditation
• mindfulness homework practice

Students that receive the intervention will be compared to students that merely received psychoeducation about stress and acceptance to see if the intervention lead to larger increases in well-being.

Enrollment: 116 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 17 to 29 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Student at the University of Amsterdam in the Bachelor's programme psychology or communication science

Exclusion criteria

• Panic Disorder as measured with the Rapid Measurement Toolkit-20 (Batterham et al., 2020; cutoff at 9)
• Asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), another lung disease (including covid-related lung complaints), or tightness of chest
• Pregnancy
• Physical disability that limits ability to move and jump

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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116 participants in 2 patient groups

Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

The intervention group follows a one-hour in-person intervention focused on acceptance of stress. Each participant follows this intervention individually.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Brief Acceptance Intervention

Control

Active Comparator group

Description:

The control group follows a 20-minute online psychoeducation at home. Each participant follows this intervention individually.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Psychoeducation