Online Socio-emotional Dyad Training for Healthcare Students' Well-being and Social Skills

Summary

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.

Conditions

• Intervention Condition
• Control (Delayed Training) Condition

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Experimental: Empathy- and compassion-based socio-emotional mental training (EmCo)

1. Participants engage in a structured 13-minute partner-based contemplative exercise. Each dyad reflects on two experiences from the previous 24 hours: one involving a difficult emotion and one involving gratitude. Partners take turns speaking while the other listens non-judgmentally. During weeks 1-4, the practice emphasizes empathic listening; during weeks 5-8, compassionate listening. Participants are instructed to attend to bodily sensations associated with the emotions described. The practice aims to improve coping with difficult emotions, empathic and compassionate listening, (self)acceptance, compassion, gratitude, resilience. 2. Participants also attend eight 1.5-hour online group sessions led by Expert Dyad teachers. The coaching sessions help deepen the Dyad practice and educate teachers about body language, coping better with difficult emotions/stress, the benefits of empathy versus compassion and the act of listening from a mindset of empathy versus compassion.

OTHER

Waitlist Control Group (WCG)

Participants in the control group will not receive the intervention. They will complete pre- and post-test procedures consisting primarily of self-report questionnaires, and behavioral tasks, as well as ecological momentary assessment (EMA) conducted on four days within two weeks at pre-test and post-test 1 \& 2.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Paracelsus Medizinische Privatuniversität (PMU)

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Max Planck Social Neuroscience Lab

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Tania Singer, Ph.D. · Social Neuroscience Lab, Max Planck Society

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

65 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2026-02-16

Primary Completion

2026-07-10

Completion

2026-10-10

Countries

• Germany

Study Locations