Learning to Thrive: Investigating the effects of an online intervention program for university students' mental health and well-being

There will be two online intervention groups. The first condition includes training modules in Behavioural Activation (BA) and Self-compassion. The second online intervention group includes training modules on Behavioural Activation (BA), Self-compassion (SC), and Social Identification (SI). First, after consenting, participants will answer a questionnaire containing well-being (i.e., anxiety, depression, academic worry, social anxiety, loneliness, and life-satisfaction) and psychological processes (self-compassion, behavioural activation, social identification, trait avoidance, and intolerance of uncertainty) measures. They will then write about a university-related issue that is worrying them. They will then be randomly assigned to one of three online conditions: the Behavioural Activation + Self-Compassion (BA+SC) condition; the Behavioural Activation + Self-Compassion + Social identification condition (BA+SC+SI); or the control condition. Each one of these conditions will take a total of five sessions, each of 15 to 30 minutes to avoid fatigue. The sessions will be administered once per week for 5 weeks. Email reminders will be sent to participants reminding them to complete each session. The amount of time that participants spend on the homework exercises will be at their discretion. Homework tasks will be referred back to in future sessions to encourage homework completion. To monitor adherence to the training program, researchers will review participant responses through the online program. In the BA+SC condition (in line with Tee, 2015), participants will first engage in behavioural activation. The first step will be to do an exercise in which they learn about the concept avoidance, and how it relates to their current university-related worry (introduction of concepts). They will then do an activity that helps identify the thoughts, feelings and behaviours related to their avoidance (activity monitoring). In the next activity, they will determine a university-related goal that will help them address the worry delineated in the first exercise (assessing goals and values). Once this goal has been established, they will do an activity that helps them schedule up to two activities in an activity planner (activity scheduling). Lastly, participants will be instructed to practice the activities by following the schedule they have created (homework). After the behavioural activation exercise, participants will then engage in self-compassion exercises. Participants will be first introduced to two concepts in addition to avoidance, namely isolation and self-judgement, in the context of their university life. They will then learn about individual-level concepts to counter these negative emotions/thoughts by using self-compassion strategies, namely self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness (introduction of concepts). After this, they will listen to an audio recording with instructions to practise self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness (self-compassion exercise). The BA+SC+SI condition combines behavioural activation and self-compassion with additional elements of social identification and group belonging. Therefore, it follows a similar procedure to the BA+SC condition but with some variations. The first variation is that participants will learn about the importance of social groups in addition to engaging in behavioural activation. They will reflect on the university groups to which they belong to, their importance in providing clear goals/values and in helping achieve their personal goals. After that, participants are directed to think about their university worry (as identified in the first exercise) and how the different groups to which they belong can help them set up priorities and achieve goals that minimise worries. Following this, participants will engage in the activity scheduling and homework, as per the BA+SC condition, with the additional group elements. The self-compassion element will also include group elements. Participants will learn about avoidance, isolation and self-judgement, but instead of focusing on individual-level thoughts/emotions to counter them, they will learn about group-level thoughts/emotions: kindness to all (vs. self-kindness) and community connection (vs. common humanity; mindfulness will stay at the individual level). The audio recording and homework will reflect these variations. Finally, participants will be asked to practice group-level-compassion before the next session and to record this in a worksheet (homework).