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Objective: To establish the prevalence of mood and wellness behaviors in college students across a school year. Methods: 1,554 college students (69.4% female; average age 18.8 years) were followed with daily surveys on wellness behaviors for the school year. 1,207 participants completed at least 50% of daily surveys on mood, exercise, sleep, nutrition, mindfulness practice and singing/playing musical instrument. Results: Over 88.7% of college students reported at least one wellness behavior each day with 17.7% reporting 4 or more. Each of the wellness behaviors, however, displayed distinct prevalence patterns, varied significantly across the school year, and often across a given school week. Almost every individual wellness behavior was associated with a positive mood, and the cumulative number of daily wellness behaviors was a strongly associated with mood state. Conclusions: Daily wellness behaviors are collectively common, vary significantly within individuals, and are strongly associated with positive mood, both individual and cumulatively. [This study was presented as an abstract at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's 66th Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, October 14-19, 2019.]

Objective: To establish the prevalence of mood and wellness behaviors in college students across a school year. Methods: 1,554 college students (69.4% female; average age 18.8 years) were followed with daily surveys on wellness behaviors for the school year. 1,207 participants completed at least 50% of daily surveys on mood, exercise, sleep, nutrition, mindfulness practice and singing/playing musical instrument. Results: Over 88.7% of college students reported at least one wellness behavior each day with 17.7% reporting 4 or more. Each of the wellness behaviors, however, displayed distinct prevalence patterns, varied significantly across the school year, and often across a given school week. Almost every individual wellness behavior was associated with a positive mood, and the cumulative number of daily wellness behaviors was a strongly associated with mood state. Conclusions: Daily wellness behaviors are collectively common, vary significantly within individuals, and are strongly associated with positive mood, both individual and cumulatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personality traits have been found to be related to a variety of health outcomes. The aim of this study was to examine how personality traits were associated with adjustment to the COVID pandemic in college students. The sample included 484 first-year university students (76% female) attending a northeastern university who completed the Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality assessment at the beginning of a semester that was disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Using a phone-based app, students completed daily ratings of mood, perceived stress levels, and engagement in a number of health promotion activities (exercise, mindfulness, adequate sleep, etc.) throughout the semester both before and after the onset of the pandemic (e.g., a within-person longitudinal design). Results, as expected, showed that mood and wellness indices generally declined during the COVID period, although stress levels actually decreased. Further, irrespective of COVID, improved mood, less perceived stress and greater participation in health promotion activities were significantly associated with a number of personality traits including neuroticism (lower), extraversion (higher), agreeableness (higher), and conscientiousness (higher). Of primary interest, mixed-effects models were used to test how major personality traits interacted with any changes in daily ratings from the pre-COVID to COVID period. Significant interactions terms were found suggesting differential impacts of the COVID epidemic for students with low versus high levels of particular traits. Higher levels of extraversion, for example, were found to be related to decreases in mood as the pandemic progressed in contrast to those with lower extraversion, for whom there was a slight increase in mood over time. These data support the conclusion that personality traits are related to mental health and can play a role in a person's ability to cope with major stressful events. Different traits may also be more adaptive to different types of stressors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Vermont Wellness Environment (UVM WE) was created based on the principles of behavior change neuroscience and incentivizes college students to make healthy choices. This study aims to determine the most effective ways to target the WE student population by surveying current WE students regarding their use of various communication platforms. WE uses email as the primary form of communication with students, but results showed that only 35.12% of WE student respondents open their emails from WE between 67 and 100% of the time. [Extracted from the article]

The University of Vermont Wellness Environment (WE) was created based on the principles of behavior change neuroscience and is a health promotion program that incentivizes college students to make healthy choices. The primary objective of this research was to test the efficacy and effectiveness of the University of Vermont WE program through the Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) intervention. For the AUDIT measure, only the CAU group reflected a statistically significant decrease in referrals from the SBIRT criteria from survey 1 (47.0%) to survey 2 (42.3%) [ SP 2 sp (1, N = 814) = 4.78, p = 0.0288]. [Extracted from the article]