Social-evaluative stressors-experiences in which people feel they could be judged negatively-pose a major threat to adolescent mental health(1-3) and can cause young people to disengage from stressful pursuits, resulting in missed opportunities to acquire valuable skills. Here we show that replicable benefits for the stress responses of adolescents can be achieved with a short (around 30-min), scalable 'synergistic mindsets' intervention. This intervention, which is a self-administered online training module, synergistically targets both growth mindsets(4) (the idea that intelligence can be developed) and stress-can-be-enhancing mindsets(5) (the idea that one's physiological stress response can fuel optimal performance). In six double-blind, randomized, controlled experiments that were conducted with secondary and post-secondary students in the United States, the synergistic mindsets intervention improved stress-related cognitions (study 1, n = 2,717; study 2, n = 755), cardiovascular reactivity (study 3, n = 160; study 4, n = 200), daily cortisol levels (study 5, n = 118 students, n = 1,213 observations), psychological well-being (studies 4 and 5), academic success (study 5) and anxiety symptoms during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns (study 6, n = 341). Heterogeneity analyses (studies 3, 5 and 6) and a four-cell experiment (study 4) showed that the benefits of the intervention depended on addressing both mindsets-growth and stress-synergistically. Confidence in these conclusions comes from a conservative, Bayesian machine-learning statistical method for detecting heterogeneous effects(6). Thus, our research has identified a treatment for adolescent stress that could, in principle, be scaled nationally at low cost.

Over the past three decades, billions have been invested in community policing to foster positive interactions between officers and community members. Yet, public trust in police continues to decline. Our qualitative analysis of over 500 hours of naturalistic observations suggests a potential reason: the questioning styles of officers in community policing may make community members feel threatened. Observations also point to a solution: transparent communication of benevolent intent. Building on this, a pre-registered field experiment (N = 232) finds that community members feel less threatened and report greater trust when officers use a brief transparency statement (e.g., "I'm walking around trying to get to know the community"). These findings are supported by exploratory natural language processing and sympathetic nervous system measures. Six online experiments (total N = 3210) further show that transparency statements are effective across diverse groups and isolate the conditions where they work best. This multi-method investigation underscores the importance of transparency in fostering positive community-police relations.

A growth-mindset intervention teaches the belief that intellectual abilities can be developed. Where does the intervention work best? Prior research examined school-level moderators using data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), which delivered a short growth-mindset intervention during the first year of high school. In the present research, we used data from the NSLM to examine moderation by teachers’ mindsets and answer a new question: Can students independently implement their growth mindsets in virtually any classroom culture, or must students’ growth mindsets be supported by their teacher’s own growth mindsets (i.e., the mindset-plus-supportive-context hypothesis)? The present analysis (9,167 student records matched with 223 math teachers) supported the latter hypothesis. This result stood up to potentially confounding teacher factors and to a conservative Bayesian analysis. Thus, sustaining growth-mindset effects may require contextual supports that allow the proffered beliefs to take root and flourish. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.

Mindset interventions, which shift students' beliefs about classroom experiences, have shown promise for promoting diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathe-matics (STEM). Psychologists have emphasized the importance of customizing these inter-ventions to specific courses, but there is not yet a protocol for doing so. We developed a protocol for creating customized peer-modeled mindset interventions that elicit advice from former students in videotaped interviews. In intervention activities, clips from these interviews, in which the former students' stories model the changes in thinking about chal-lenge and struggle that helped them succeed in a specific course, are provided to incom-ing life sciences students. Using this protocol, we developed a customized intervention for three sections of Introductory Biology I at a large university and tested it in a randomized controlled trial (N = 917). The intervention shifted students' attributions for struggle in the class away from a lack of potential to succeed and toward the need to develop a better ap-proach to studying. The intervention also improved students' approaches to studying and sense of belonging and had promising effects on performance and persistence in biology. Effects were pronounced among first-generation college students and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students, who have been historically underrepresented in the STEM fields.

This registered study aimed at testing the role of emotion in the intervention effect of an experimental intervention study in academic settings. Previous analyses of the National Study of the Learning Mindset (Yeager et al., 2019) showed that in a randomized controlled trial, high school students who were given the growth mindset intervention had, on average higher GPA than did students in the control condition. Previous analyses also showed that school achievement levels moderated the intervention effect. This study applied a sentence level text analysis strategy to detect participants' attentional focus in five emotional dimensions (valence, arousal, dominance/control, approach-avoidant, and uncertainty) across three writing prompts students wrote during the intervention. Linear mixed models were conducted to test if emotional dimension scores computed using the text analysis predicted a higher intervention effect (i.e., higher post-intervention GPA given pre intervention GPA). The moderating role of school achievement levels was also examined. The results of this study have implications on the possibility of applying text analysis strategies on open-ended questions in interventions or experimental studies to examine the role of the emotion-attentional focus of participants during intervention or experimental studies on the intervention or experimental outcomes, especially those that are conducted in academic settings.

The contributed papers in this special issue each provide valuable perspectives on how social processes are relevant to academic motivation. Yet a critical question remains: How can this research lead to concrete guidance for educators who wish to create motivating and equitable classrooms? We propose this complex task can be simplified by encouraging educators to address students' concerns about how they are viewed by instructors in school. Our review of the literature suggests that two meta-concerns are particularly important to address for students from groups marginalized in education: whether instructors may (1) see them as limited in academic potential and (2) narrowly define them by their academic success. We argue that effective teaching practices address these concerns by communicating two corresponding messages: (1) inclusive expectations, I recognize your potential for academic growth and (2) broad regard, I regard you as a whole person, with a range of personal values, social identities, and relationships. These messages can shift students away from a narrow sense of self, in which their value is defined by current academic performance, and towards an expansive sense of self, in which students feel both academically capable and valued for more than just their academic success. We present evidence that novice instructors can use this framework to develop or adapt practices that are attuned to marginalized students' two meta-concerns and enhance student motivation and engagement. Throughout this commentary, we describe how this framework can build on the important theoretical advances presented elsewhere in this special issue.

Individuals who are strongly fused with a group view the group as self-defining. As such, they should be particularly reluctant to leave it. For the first time, we investigate the implications of identity fusion for university retention. We found that students who were strongly fused with their university (+1SD) were 7-9% points more likely than weakly fused students (-1SD) to remain in school up to a year later. Fusion with university predicted subsequent retention in four samples (N = 3,193) and held while controlling for demographics, personality, prior academic performance, and belonging uncertainty. Interestingly, fusion with university was largely unrelated to grades, suggesting that identity fusion provides a novel pathway to retention independent of established pathways like academic performance. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.