Stress mindsets matter: An overview of how individuals think about stress, its effect on biopsychosocial processes, and what we can do about it.

In the past two decades, stress researchers have mainly studied the harmful consequences of stress on individuals' physical, psychological and performance outcomes. Hence, these adverse effects were broadly shared through the media, leading to the conventional thinking that stress is "mostly a bad thing to be avoided". Yet, stress is not always bad; in some contexts, high stress levels are normal and desirable. Besides the adaptative nature of these stress responses to environmental threats or challenges, they were also shown to facilitate personal initiative, productivity (Dienstbier, 1989; Epel, McEwen, & Ickovics, 1998; Fay & Sonnentag, 2002), and performance (Jamieson et al., 2010). What then determines whether stress responses help or harm individuals? A recent research field is interested in studying how the way individuals think of, perceive, or appraise stress influences stress-related outcomes. Stress mindsets are the meta-cognitive processes that shape how individuals interpret stress's overall meaning as debilitating (negative) or enhancing (positive). Interestingly, these stress mindsets are important moderators of whether stress responses end up being good or bad for individuals. When confronted with specific stressful situations such as academic tests, stress mindsets shape whether individuals appraise their stress responses as either a resource to face the situation or harmful and uncontrollable. Individuals who hold the mindset that stress-can-be-enhancing benefit the most from their stress responses, as shown, for instance, by increased performance on tests. Grounded in the mindset theory and the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat (Jamieson et al., 2018), new interventions were developed to inform individuals that the broad nature of stress can be enhancing and even beneficial. These interventions are called « wise interventions » as they are very short and aim to manipulate the psychological processes by which people make sense of themselves, the world, or any situation they are facing (Walton & Wilson, 2018). Results from studies evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions showed that stress mindsets were indeed easily malleable. Furthermore, by optimizing stress mindsets, individuals benefited from several positive physiological, psychological, and performance outcomes (Crum et al., 2013, 2017; Yeager et al., 2022; Jamieson et al., 2013, 2016; Keech et al., 2018). However, while this promising field of research is growing, some questions remain. First, as this field is mainly based on college participants, more is needed to know about how stress mindsets vary between individuals and other population groups. Audrey-Ann Journault (University of Montreal, Canada) will present a study showing how stress mindsets vary across three age groups and gender in a large descriptive study. Second, the moderating effect of stress mindsets on various cognitive outcomes under stressful conditions remains to be examined. Felix Duplessis-Marcotte (University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada) will discuss recent evidence from an experimental study that a stress-can-be-enhancing mindset differentially affects decision-making under stressful conditions across sexes. Third, while stress mindsets are a belief system about what stress can be, they may not in themselves help people seek out and engage with difficult stressors. Thus, research has shown that it is also important to teach individuals 1) that they can grow and learn from difficult challenges as their abilities are malleable (i.e., to develop a growth mindset) and 2) that they can appraise their stress responses (e.g., increased heart rate) in these specific situations as additional tools to persevere through difficulties and attain valued goals. A new synergistic mindsets intervention integrating both ideas has shown promising psychological and physiological effects, but these were heterogeneous. Hence, this field of research now aims to explore psychological affordances, or in other words, what modulating factors explain that these interventions work in some contexts but not others? Cameron Hecht (University of Texas, United States) will discuss the effects of this synergistic mindsets intervention on peripheral resistance (i.e., a measure of vasoconstriction in the body's periphery) under a specific laboratory stressful condition (TSST), and on young adults' appraisals of this specific stressor as being whether challenging or threatening. He will also show that the consistency between the messages communicated by the classroom instructors and the intervention content is one contextual factor that can help maintain the intervention's effects over time and explain part of the heterogeneity in these effects. Finally, compared to the clear beneficial effects of the mindsets intervention on the autonomic system, its effects on the HPA axis (as measured by salivary cortisol) have been inconsistent and sometimes surprising. Karishma Singh (University of Rochester, United States) will discuss the recent promising results from an experimental study that further assessed the effects of the synergistic mindsets intervention in a school-based ecological context. Using a diary journaling design, this study captured the daily stressful situations that youth from minoritized and low-income backgrounds experienced throughout a week. She will present that the synergistic mindsets intervention decreased youth's daily cortisol levels while increasing their academic grades in difficult classes (e.g., mathematics and sciences) compared to a control condition. Understanding better individual differences in stress mindsets, their psychological and physiological implications, and the contexts in which stress mindsets interventions are best helpful will contribute to extending the research on stress. Most of all, this symposium also aims to create a place for collective reflections and discussions about the negative angle we chose and promote while studying stress and its potential repercussions for the lay public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]