App-based Mental Health Promotion in Young European Adults

Summary

The ECoWeB Project aims to develop and disseminate a mobile application (App) to provide engaging and personalized tools and psychological skills to promote emotional wellbeing and prevent mental health problems in adolescents and young adults.

The project team involves 8 European nations (the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Greece, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Switzerland) working together in order to improve mental health care and access for adolescents and young adults:

* To use technology as a tool to assess and promote emotional well-being.
* To deliver empirically supported psychological interventions through a smart phone application to address the needs of adolescents and young adults.
* To improve mental well-being and prevent mental health problems in European adolescents and young adults.

The ECoWeb project will consist of 2 RCT's within a longitudinal prospective cohort called ECoWeB-PROMOTE (indicating PROMOTION of well-being and good mental health) and ECoWeB-PREVENT (indicating PREVENTION of general distress, poor mental health and emotional disorders) respectively.

These trials share the same recruitment procedure, interventions, outcomes (including self-report measures of well-being, anxiety, and depression) and design. Both are interested in the promotion of well-being and the prevention of general poor mental health in young people. The key difference is whether the participants are deemed to be at higher or lower risk criteria for poor mental health based on their general emotional competence skills, i.e., for those at low risk, do the interventions further enhance well-being, for those at higher risk, do the interventions prevent the worsening of poor mental health, general stress and distress, as well as enhancing well-being. In all cases the recruitment procedure will be the same, but the inclusion and exclusion criteria are different and the primary outcome measures are different hence they are 2 trials, rather than one, all running within the same cohort.

Conditions

• Wellbeing
• Mental Disorder

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Tailored Emotional Competence Self-help

The active interventions are all entirely self-help and provide psycho-education, tips, advice and strategies for well-being promotion. Interventions are personalised to the individual based on emotional competence skills. Intervention is in addition to self-monitoring in the app. Intervention components include selection of 2 from 4 of : targeting worry and rumination; increasing emotional knowledge and perception skills; improving achievement appraisals including attribution retraining and growth mindset; improving social appraisals including positive interpretations of ambiguous social events

BEHAVIORAL

Cognitive-behavioural Approach

The active interventions are all entirely self-help and provide psycho-education, tips, advice and strategies for well-being promotion, based on cognitive-behavioural principles such as increased activity and challenging negative thinking. Interventions are generic and common to all participants. Intervention is in addition to self-monitoring in the app.

BEHAVIORAL

Self-monitoring

Self-monitoring app that involves monitoring emotions and emotional events over time within the app and being able to review emotion over time

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University Ghent

  collaborator OTHER

• Ludwig-Maximilians - University of Munich

  collaborator OTHER

• Universitat Jaume I

  collaborator OTHER

• Audeering GMBH

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• Institute of Communications and Computer Systems, Athens, Greece

  collaborator OTHER

• Monsenso

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• University of Oxford

  collaborator OTHER

• Brno University of Technology

  collaborator OTHER

• The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Geneva, Switzerland

  collaborator OTHER

• Københavns Universitet

  collaborator OTHER

• Deutsches Jugendinstitut e.V.

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Exeter

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Ed Watkins, PhD · University of Exeter

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

TRIPLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

16 Years

Max Age

22 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-10-09

Primary Completion

2022-07-31

Completion

2022-09-30

Countries

• Belgium
• Germany
• Spain
• United Kingdom

Study Locations