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Students Rising Above: Offsetting the Health and Mental Health Costs of Resilience

Project STRIVE (STudents RIsing Above) - Offsetting the Health and Mental Health Costs of Resilience

Who can join

Ages 13 and older · All sexes · Healthy volunteers welcome

Inclusion Criteria:

* Enrolled in 10th or 11th grade at a participating high school
* Black, Latinx, Asian American/Pacific Islander, or American Indian/Alaskan Native
* High achieving (e.g., GPA above 3.5 and/or in the top 20% of their grade, enrolled in advanced classes such as AP/IB/honors classes)

Exclusion Criteria:

* Intellectual Disability

About the study

Students who 'strive' to rise above significant stressors to achieve academic success are considered 'resilient'. However, youths' resilience in one domain (i.e. academic) can come at a cost in other domains including physical and mental health morbidities that are under-identified and under-treated. Previous research suggests that individuals from populations experiencing documented health disparities who exhibit a "striving persistent behavioral style" in the face of stress evince later health morbidities. Ironically, the same self-regulatory skills that promote academic achievement amid chronic stress can also result in physiological dysregulation that harms health and mental health. Self-regulatory processes that involve emotion suppression, experiential avoidance, and unmodulated perseverance can culminate in allostatic load which fuels health disparities and internalizing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

The proposed mechanistic trial will utilize mindfulness training to permit examination of questions about the causal role of emotion regulation strategies linked to the striving persistent behavioral style in driving mental health and health morbidities among individuals from populations experiencing documented health disparities. The proposed Project STRIVE (STudents RIsing aboVE) will identify students who are academically resilient in the face of stress and will offer a tailored mindfulness intervention targeting self-regulation processes as a putative mechanism to interrupt the links between the striving persistent behavioral style and negative health outcomes. Investigators propose a multisite randomized trial randomizing 504 high achieving Black, Latinx, or Asian America/Pacific Islander students in 18 schools to receive a mindfulness intervention or an attention control condition focused on study skills. The study will: (1) test the effects of the STRIVE intervention on putative self-regulation mechanisms (emotion suppression, experiential avoidance, and unmodulated perseverance) among identified students, (2) test the effects of the STRIVE intervention on health and mental health outcomes at 12-month post-treatment, including biomarkers of allostatic load (cortisol, blood pressure, body-mass-index, waist/hip/neck circumference), health complaints, and internalizing symptoms, and (3) examine the mechanistic model linking striving persistent behavioral style and health outcomes within the STRIVE trial.

What is being tested

• STRIVE (behavioral)
• Study Skills (behavioral)

Sponsor: University of California, Los Angeles · Participants: 504 · Started: Jan 9, 2023

Contact the study team

• Anna S Lau, PhD · Phone: (310) 206-5363

Official record on ClinicalTrials.gov — NCT05846282

Locations in the U.S.

From ClinicalTrials.gov, data retrieved Oct 2, 2026. Each study sets its own eligibility; the study team decides who can join.