Recalling and Anticipating Specific Positive Events to Boost Resilience in Adolescents (RASPERA)

Prof. dr. Filip Raes

Status: Completed

Conditions: Specific Positive Memories; Mental Wellbeing; Resilience; Specific Positive Future Events

Treatments: Behavioral: CREAtive writing Training (CREAT); Behavioral: Positive Events Training (PET)

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05757180

G049019N (Other Grant/Funding Number)

Details and patient eligibility

About

Many young people are experiencing stress-related mental health problems, with some recent studies suggesting this number is increasing. Especially now, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a significant increase in depression and anxiety in adolescents. An important way to help address this challenge is not so much to focus on trying to repair what makes young people vulnerable but to focus on building resilience. Resilience refers to the ability to successfully deal with stressful experiences. Recent research shows that being able to vividly remember and imagine positive events can buffer the negative consequences of stress, and makes a convincing case that training adolescents in recalling and anticipating positive events would promote resilience and thereby improve their mental wellbeing. And this is exactly what the current project sets out to do for the very first time. Adolescents will receive a playful group-training in school to make them better at recalling and anticipating positive events, which is expected to help them to bounce back more swiftly from challenging or otherwise stressful life events. The investigators predict that youngsters who follow our Positive Event Training will experience more positive emotions, will show improved resilience and report better mental wellbeing. The investigators will also develop a free online training protocol for teachers so that schools can provide this resilience program on their own, without the need of external professional trainers.

Enrollment: 191 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 12 to 16 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• All adolescents of the selected classes of the participating schools (12-16 years; 1st and 2nd grade of secondary school) who want to take part in the study and give informed consent (own informed consent and active parental informed consent) will be allowed to take part in the study.
• To minimize the risk of too much heterogeneity in our final sample, for instance due to context factors related to the type of education, the investigators will first recruit classes of adolescents that follow general secondary education. Future studies (after PET has been properly evaluated in this study) should also be conducted in samples of adolescents following other types of secondary education.

Exclusion criteria

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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191 participants in 2 patient groups

Intervention group

Experimental group

Description:

Classes that will follow Positive Events Training.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Positive Events Training (PET)

Control group

Active Comparator group

Description:

Classes that will follow Bogus Control Training.

Treatment:

Behavioral: CREAtive writing Training (CREAT)