Clinical Research Directory

Online Socio-emotional Dyad Training for Healthcare Students' Well-being and Social Skills

In this Edu:Social Health Care project, a randomized controlled trial with a socio-emotional intervention and a waitlist control group will be conducted to evaluate the effects of a partner-based empathy-compassion Dyad mental training (EmCo) intervention on healthcare students with regard to the following primary outcome domains: 1) mental health, 2) resilience, 3) social cohesion and support, 4) social skills, 5) coping and emotion regulation, and 6) social behaviors. One main goal is to examine the effects of such adapted 8-week EmCo Dyad intervention within the health care context, with a particular focus on strengthening students' mental health, resilience, social skills and behaviors, and social cohesion as well as fostering interprofessional attitudes by pairing every week study partners across different healthcare disciplines with each other for practicing their daily Dyads (e.g., nursing students will practice daily via app with medical students). A further aim is to validate the novel Dyad Voice Assessment (DYVA) task, which explores the use of app-based voice recordings as indicators of students' emotional states during their daily partner-based Dyad practice. By combining students' self-reported practice-related emotions with partner-based evaluations, this approach aims to generate new and innovate, more objective markers of training-induced changes in emotional processing and regulation over time in a real-live applied setting. The final aim is to investigate the cognitive and affective mechanisms and factors underlying observed changes in students' mental health, resilience, social cohesion, social skills and social behaviors, that may explain observed training-related effects in primary outcome domains. Based on previous research, we expect the socio-emotional EmCo Dyad training to activate evolutionary old care- and affiliation-based motivational systems that foster positive affect and motivation, acceptance, trust social capacities and behavioral tendencies. These processes should go along with reduction in loneliness, stress and other mental vulnerabilities (anxiety, depression, burn-out etc.) and foster social skills such as empathy, compassion as well as social cohesion and resilience.