A single-course intervention promotes stress-is-enhancing mindset: A practice in the Chinese classroom.

Adolescents today face unprecedented levels of stress. Recent research has shown that adopting a stress-is-enhancing mindset can protect adolescents from the adverse effects of stress, and more importantly, this mindset can be altered by interventions. However, limited studies have investigated effective methods for changing adolescents' stress mindset, particularly in China, where academic stress is exceptionally high. This study examined the effects of a single 40-min stress mindset intervention delivered in a classroom setting at a Chinese middle school. Data were collected and analyzed from 174 eighth-grade students (97 in the intervention group and 77 in the control group). The results from difference-in-differences model showed that students in the intervention group demonstrated a significantly stronger stress-is-enhancing mindset compared to those in the control group. Within the intervention group, students who exhibited a greater shift toward a stress-is-enhancing mindset showed a larger reduction in perceived stress. However, there was no significant overall reduction in perceived stress at the group level. These findings suggest that traditional classroom teaching can serve as a practical and accessible approach for cultivating a stress-is-enhancing mindset, and they underscore the need for further research to evaluate the effectiveness of the teacher-led stress mindset intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).