A Brief Acceptance Intervention for Stress to Improve Students' Well-Being

Examining the Effectiveness, Mediators, and Moderators of a Brief Acceptance Intervention for Stress to Improve Students' Well-Being: A Randomized Controlled Trial

The goal of this randomized controlled trial is to test a brief psychological intervention that focusses on acceptance of stress in a student population. The main questions it aims to answer are:

• Does this brief acceptance intervention increase the well-being of students in the short term?
• By which mechanisms does this effect occur?
• What are moderating factors of this effect?

Half of the participants follow a one-hour intervention, which includes

• psychoeducation and metaphors about stress and how acceptance can help to deal with it
• experiential exercises
• mindfulness meditation
• mindfulness homework practice

Students that receive the intervention will be compared to students that merely received psychoeducation about stress and acceptance to see if the intervention lead to larger increases in well-being.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Student at the University of Amsterdam in the Bachelor's programme psychology or communication science

Exclusion Criteria:

• Panic Disorder as measured with the Rapid Measurement Toolkit-20 (Batterham et al., 2020; cutoff at 9)
• Asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), another lung disease (including covid-related lung complaints), or tightness of chest
• Pregnancy
• Physical disability that limits ability to move and jump