Discussion
infection
REGRESSION, EVENTS, INFECTION
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted adolescent mental health on a global scaleFirst, we hypothesized that students with a growth mindset would (1a) demonstrate more school-related resilience and, (1b) use more adaptive coping strategies. To test the resilience hypothesis (1a), we first needed to regress mental health (school burnout) on stressor exposure, while correcting for pre-pandemic mental health. In line with national and international researchTo test the coping hypothesis (1b), we first identified six higher-order coping styles with principal component analysis: maladaptive (Second, we hypothesized that the positive association between growth mindset and resilience would be mediated by coping styles. We confirmed this hypothesis. Students who endorsed a growth mindset reported less maladaptive coping/more adaptive (acceptance) coping, which were in turn related to higher resilience during the pandemic. Third, when we further explored the intervention subsamples, the mediation of maladaptive coping was only present for students who had received the growth mindset intervention two years earlier, but not for those who received the control intervention. Overall, our findings fit with theoretical predictions of how beliefs form a framework for assigning meaning to events, especially when facing adversityIn this study we confirmed that growth mindset is a resilience factor, but importantly, also one that can be trained. We addressed an important gap in the literature, which was identified by Burnette et al.Active coping was not related to mindset and resilience. A possible reason may be sought in the type of stressor that COVID-19 represented. Although students could control to a certain level how strictly they followed lockdown rules and the risk for infection, to a large extent there were external consequences at play outside students’ control, including lockdown measures that disproportionally affected schools. In turn, this may have induced an external locus of control, in which active coping strategies were less applicable. This seems to be supported by the fact that acceptance coping was related to mindset and resilience, which involved ‘accepting the reality’ of the pandemic. In addition, developmental changes in coping during adolescenceA few limitations of the current study should be considered. First, previous work shows that the strength of associations between mindset and psychological distress and coping are dependent on mindset domain, with stronger effects for emotion-based mindsets, and smaller but significant effects for intelligence-based mindsetsThe present work also has considerable strengths. Due to its unique and coincidental timing, we could control for pre-pandemic school burnout symptoms, which contributes to the specificity of our findings concerning school-related resilience during COVID. In addition, the RCT design allowed us to explore whether a growth mindset intervention influenced associations between mindset, coping and resilience two years later, indicating tentative causal evidence. In addition, we considered resilience as an outcome measure—maintaining mental health despite stressor exposure—which we operationalized based on individuals’ residuals onto the regression curve between mental health (school burnout symptoms) and stress exposure (based onIn conclusion, we presented unique evidence for the beneficial effects of growth mindset on school-related resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the mediating effects of coping styles as explanatory mechanism. This work contributes to a growing literature that shows positive effects of growth mindset on mental health