The teenage girl's plight is often portrayed in popular media as screaming matches with parents, sneaking out of the house late at night and crying over the latest crush. Adolescent girls experience significant cognitive growth during these pivotal years, but dealing with new circumstances at school, in the home and beyond can rightfully trigger intense emotional responses.
But what if we erased the assumption of volatility, deeming some teenage girls as “too emotional” or “highly emotionally reactive” as a temporary state of being rather than a fixed attribute? It turns out that empowering teen girls with a psychoeducational intervention can have a significant impact.
Karen Rudolph is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science at Illinois. Her latest study sought to investigate whether a single-session intervention could improve teenage girls' emotional responses to stressors. Her paper appears in the Society for Research in Child Development’s journal.
Karen Rudolph explains her research in 60 seconds.“We wanted to understand the role of emotion mindsets; that is, whether people believe emotions are innate and fixed or whether they can be more malleable,” Rudolph said. “We looked at the role of emotion mindsets during the teenage years, when kids are thought to be highly emotional, and were curious if we could cultivate a growth emotion mindset in girls.”
A so-called “growth mindset,” as opposed to a “fixed mindset,” is not a new concept and has been applied in different settings, including education. Instead of a child labeling themselves as “unintelligent,” educators can foster the belief that with continued learning and studying, they can gain knowledge, meaning intelligence isn’t a fixed attribute but rather something that can be taught and learned.
“We adapted this concept to showcase the differences in mindsets about emotion,” Rudolph said. “Then we set out to develop an intervention conveying several important ideas, one of these being that negative emotions are natural and normal, but that practicing certain emotion regulation strategies can help adolescent girls feel more in control of their emotions.”
Rudolph and her team created a self-administered psychoeducational lesson, E-MIND, which aims to cultivate a growth mindset about emotions. The teens received information about the human brain's neuroplasticity, a scientific concept suggesting that the brain is constantly evolving, and individuals can help change it. Girls in the E-MIND group were exposed to the idea that practicing healthy regulation strategies, such as reframing situations in their head or seeking support from others, can help individuals down the line, in part by changing connections in the developing brain. A control group received a psychoeducational lesson that provided general education about the brain and its functions.
To test the intervention's effect, the teens were surveyed before and after tasks such as a stressful oral presentation. They also received a follow-up survey two and four months later to gauge the degree to which the lessons stuck.
“We were pleased to see that after the intervention, the E-MIND group was more likely to report that they were proactively dealing with negative emotions, such as reframing situations or seeking support from other people and were less likely to report that they were responding to stressful situations involuntarily,” Rudolph said. “Girls in this group reported fewer reactions to stressors that included ruminating, freezing or not knowing how to handle duress.”
Overall, results from the study suggested that the E-MIND lesson promoted stronger growth mindsets and improvements in emotion regulation self-efficacy and strategy use both in the lab and in everyday life, with the most consistent results in girls who had high levels of pre-intervention fixed mindsets or who perceived the lesson to be easier to understand.
“There were a few areas where we didn’t find much of a difference between the control group and the E-MIND group, which is equally important to understand,” Rudolph said.
For example, participants did not report a meaningful difference in their experience of negative emotions around the stressful oral presentation. Additionally, independent observers could not see visible group differences in the oral presentation between the two groups, one that received the intervention and one that did not. These observer reports were instead predicted by the teens’ mindsets prior to receiving the intervention.
“What this tells us is that maybe the lesson is encouraging them to think and act differently, but it still might take a while to succeed in managing emotions,” Rudolph said.
Another key component of the research was using functional magnetic resonance imaging at Beckman to monitor different patterns of brain function associated with emotion regulation following the intervention. Rudolph said that so far, they have only scratched the surface in terms of understanding whether the intervention influenced how different regions of the brain were activated when trying to regulate negative emotions. However, some early results suggest that the intervention group may show more adaptive neural regulation of emotion than the control group.
“We can’t say yet whether this will be an intervention for girls who are at high risk for emotional disorders, but it could be a helpful community staple that can have important benefits for teenagers,” Rudolph said. “Given its low cost, this intervention could one day be integrated into school curricula or other community health programs.”
Editor's note:
The paper titled “Cultivating emotional resilience in adolescent girls: Effects of a growth emotion mindset lesson” can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14175
For full author information, please consult the publication.
Media contact: Jenna Kurtzweil, kurtzwe2@illinois.edu
