A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress.

Social-evaluative stressors-experiences in which people feel they could be judged negatively-pose a major threat to adolescent mental health 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 (the idea that intelligence can be developed) and stress-can-be-enhancing mindsets (the idea that one's physiological stress response can fuel optimal performance).