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.
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Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)
Maslach Burnout Inventory-Students Survey (MBI-SS)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)
UCLA Loneliness Scale (UCLA)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)
Connor Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)
Social closeness (IOS per profession)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)
Interprofessionalism Scale (IPAS-D)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)
Social Support Scale (F-SozU K-6)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)
Socio-Affective Video Task (SoVT)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test), after 4 weeks of empathic listening training (mid-intervention) and after the 4 weeks of compassionate listening training (post-test 1 & 2)
Sussex-Oxford Compassion Scale for Self and Others (SOCS)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test), after 4 weeks of empathic listening training (mid-intervention) and after the 4 weeks of compassionate listening training (post-test 1 & 2)
Mentalization Scale (MENTS)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2).
Prosodic Features of Vocalized Emotional Expressions
Timeframe: Assessed weekly from week 1 to week 8, as part of the Dyad Voice Assessment (DYVA)
Affect Dimensions of Vocalized Emotional Expressions
Timeframe: Assessed weekly from week 1 to week 8, as part of the Dyad Voice Assessment (DYVA)
Affect Categories of Vocalized Emotional Expressions
Timeframe: Assessed weekly from week 1 to week 8, as part of the Dyad Voice Assessment (DYVA)
Stress intensity
Timeframe: Assessed using an EMA design with five push-notification measurements per day, distributed across five 3-hour intervals, on four days within a two-week period, at pre-test (Baseline) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-intervention).
Coping strategies
Timeframe: Assessed using an EMA design with five push-notification measurements per day, distributed across five 3-hour intervals, on four days within a two-week period, at pre-test (Baseline) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-intervention).
Active Empathic Listening Scale (AELS)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test), after 4 weeks of empathic listening training (mid-intervention) and after the 4 weeks of compassionate listening training (post-test 1 & 2)
Attachment behavior (ASQ)
Timeframe: Assessed at baseline (pre-test) and after the 8-week intervention period (post-test 1 & 2)